Software Requirements Quotes

“Chapter 2. Requirements from the customer’s perspective”
― Karl E. Wiegers, Software Requirements

“When bad requirements happen to good people”
― Karl E. Wiegers, Software Requirements

“business requirements should come from the person who is ultimately accountable for the business value expected from the product. User requirements should come from people who will press the keys, touch the screen, or receive the outputs.”
― Karl E. Wiegers, Software Requirements

“Requirements elicitation typically takes either a usage-centric or a product-centric approach, although other strategies also are possible. The usage-centric strategy emphasizes understanding and exploring user goals to derive the necessary system functionality. The product-centric approach focuses on defining features that you expect will lead to marketplace or business success. A risk with product-centric strategies is that you might implement features that don’t get used much, even if they seemed like a good idea at the time. We recommend understanding business objectives and user goals first, then using that insight to determine the appropriate product features and characteristics.”
― Karl E. Wiegers, Software Requirements

“Assign someone who isn’t actively participating in the discussion to be the scribe, responsible for taking accurate notes. Session notes should contain an attendee list, invitees who did not attend, decisions made, actions to be taken and who is responsible for each, outstanding issues, and the high points of key discussions.”
― Karl Wiegers, Software Requirements

“If possible, quantify the contribution the feature makes towards the business objectives, so that people can make scoping decisions on the basis of facts rather than emotions ([ref013]). Will a specific feature contribute roughly $1,000, $100,000, or $1,000,000 toward a business objective? When an executive requests a new feature that he thought of over the weekend, you can use quantitative analysis to help determine if adding it is the right business decision.”
― Karl Wiegers, Software Requirements