Formal Requirements

When gathering requirements for designing a large software system, it is common to find yourself ending up with a lot of potential requirements. It is useful to organize these in some formal fashion, as it makes it far easier to find the right requirements for the right point in the design phase. It also can make it easier to determine if you’ve missed any potentially important requirements.

So what exactly is a requirement? To put it succinctly, a requirement is:

A capability that a product must possess to satisfy a customer need or objective

A requirement can also be thought of as a key component of the software as a business product. This is how your managers, marketers, and your contract likely think of it. To them, a requirement is something that your company has agreed to furnish in the final software product.

For you and your software development team, they serve a slightly different purpose. They help you to define what the goals of your development will be, as well as helping to define the scope of your project. Finally, they provide an objective way to measure the success of a project - either the final software meets the requirement, or it doesn’t.