Course Overview:

Poorly defined requirements cause up to two-thirds of software errors, yet few organizations know effective methods to review requirements to assure they are clear, correct, and complete. At most, they typically use one or two weak methods and don’t recognize the weakness. This interactive session introduces 21 methods with increasing power. Following the CAT-Scan Approach(tm), participants apply the techniques successively to a
real case and discover how each different method reveals additional,
otherwise-overlooked requirements defects when they are easiest and least expensive to fix. Participants learn ways to find previously overlooked requirements, increase meaningful customer/user involvement, enhance communications and understanding, and truly test the adequacy of requirements definitions.

This course shows ways to evaluate adequacy of requirements which already have been collected—that they are accurate, clear, and complete. The course is not describing how to test that the delivered software meets the requirements. Nor is it intended to teach how to discover requirements, although the review methods do suggest methods which would help discovery. Our two-day companion course, Defining and Writing REAL Business/User
Requirements, does concentrate on teaching how to discover, analyze, and document REAL requirements.

* Why catching requirements issues up-front is so important and so difficult
* Generally unrecognized weaknesses of the five ‘regular ways’ relied on for reviewing requirements
* Two foundation techniques that apply to and strengthen all the
other ways to review requirements
* More demanding, seldom-known techniques for revealing
ordinarily-overlooked requirements
* The most commonly-known and used methods that address format issues, such as clarity/testability
* Most demanding, least-known ways that detect incorrect and
incomplete requirements