Monday, June 16, 2008

Interpreting RD SP 1.2

Please help me understand Requirments Development (RD) Specific Practice (SP) 1.2 Develop the Customer Requirements. The Typical Work Products listed for this practice are
  1. Customer requirements
  2. Customer constraints on the conduct of verification
  3. Customer constraints on the conduct of validation

How are work products 2 and 3 different from the first work product?

The expected component for SP 1.2 is “Transform stakeholder needs, expectations, constraints, and interfaces into customer requirements.” There are many different ways to accomplish this Specific Practice as well as there are many different work products that will be created by accomplishing this SP. Your question is regarding the list of Typical Work Products. Typical Work Products are part of the Informative Component and are NEITHER required NOR expected. They are provided to give you some idea or hint, if you need it, as to what types of work product(s) result from transforming needs etc. into customer requirements.

Customer requirements are the most obvious output or work product from this SP. The other two may only be evident or applicable when providing a custom-built product. In this situation the customer may be placing some restrictions on how you perform verification and/or validation. Possibly on the use of certain test facilities, use of certain test data, etc. The specific constraints would be specified by the customer and/or be the result of requirements analysis.

In my opinion, it is not that important to be concerned about the second and third items in the list of Typical Work Products. What is important is performing the practice and creating the list of customer requirements. The proper performance of this practice will determine what the true work products are for your organization. And, in point of fact, you may end up calling all three examples of Typical Work Products “customer requirements.”

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