Developing Verification Requirements to Assure Project Success

Abstract

AbstractA well thought out and planned set of verification requirements can make all the difference between a happy customer and a dissatisfied customer. If you cannot provide confidence to the customer that you met their requirements, you won't have a happy customer. Yet few projects these days invest much effort in developing good verification requirements. Quite often, verification requirements are treated as an afterthought to the performance requirements. But, if we produce the verification requirements concurrently with the performance requirements, the verification requirements can expose problems in the performance requirements they are intended to verify. Of course, this not only leads to better verification requirements, but to better performance requirements, which leads to a happy customer.Why is it then that most requirements training courses just gloss over the development of verification requirements? Verification requirements are actually very different from the requirements they support. While they share the same syntax and basic requirements writing rules as performance requirements, you usually need many verification requirements to properly verify that a single performance requirement is satisfied.This tutorial will enlighten both the new SE as well as the grizzled veteran who needs a refresher about how to properly develop good verification requirements. We will go though a number of real world examples of good and bad verification requirements, and how they contributed to success and failure. We will establish the philosophical foundation for writing verification requirements, and present a simple process for developing verification requirements for broad classes of performance and functional requirements.