Writing Effective Requirements Specifications

Properties
•Complete
–All relevant scenarios must be covered
–Forgetting requirements is expensive
•Realistic
–Functional requirements and non-functional requirements should not contradict each other
•e.g.: the response time of a system which solves mixed integer programming problems is usually long
•Correct
–The requirements must correctly reflect the challenges posed by the environment
•Negative example: Y2K-Problem
•Modifyable
–Related requirements should be grouped together, so that changes can be made locally
•Ranked according to priority