Understanding Requirements - Requirements Engineering and Management for Software Development Projects - page 31

2. Requirements elicitation/gathering—When required, the requirements need
to be gathered in the same way as explained for the new project requirements
evolution in the above section. When requirements need to be elicited/gathered,
they will be collated using personal interviews and surveys as the tools.
3. Requirements analysis—When requirements are provided, they will be ana-
lyzed for their adequacy and completeness and clarifications are obtained. If
there are requirements which are elicited/gathered, they will be analyzed for
their feasibility for implementation.
4. Finalize the requirements—The finalized requirements would then be docu-
mented conforming to the agreed standards. These will be subjected to an
internal quality assurance process and internal approvals need to be obtained.
Then the approved document would be forwarded to the customer for their
feedback and approval.
5. Customer approvals—A Customer would review the requirements document
for the completeness of information and to ensure that the requirements are
properly understood by the vendor. The customer would communicate feed-
back, if any, for implementation and after the document is to their satisfaction,
the customer would accord the approval to the requirements document. This
approved document would be subjected to the rigor of the vendor's configu-
ration and change management process. This document would be the reference
point for all matters relating to project requirements between the outsourcer and
the vendor.
Of course, there would be variations to the evolution of requirements from one
organization to another. What is presented here are the typical scenarios. Another
aspect to be noted is that the projects are of various types. There are full life cycle
projects, part life cycle projects, testing projects, conversion projects, porting
projects, migration projects and so on. 1 Whatever the project type, requirements
are the first step in the project execution and any error committed in this phase
would have a recurring impact on all the subsequent phases of the project.
1 Interested readers are suggested to read the topic ''Mastering Software Project Management:
Best Practices, Tools and Techniques'' by Murali Chemuturi and Thomas M. Cagley, Jr.,
published by J.Ross Publishing, Inc, USA, 2010.