What is requirements validation ?

To find the right solution that would fulfill the identified business need, the requirements need to be gathered from the right stakeholders.

Once these requirements have been gathered, they have to be analyzed and documented to fully understand them.

Once the requirements have been specified and modeled they need to be verified.

Once the requirements have been verified, then they would need to be validated.

The validate requirements activity is used to ensure that all the requirements that have been created and verified are in line with the business requirements and that they would fulfill the future state of the organization.

The requirements validation activity happens on throughout the life cycle of the project to ensure that the requirements remain valid to the future state of the process.

It is can also be used to help the stakeholders visualize the future state of the solution.

Because even if the stakeholders might think they know what the future state should be, stating it clearly might help them identify gaps which might not have been previously obvious to them.

There are three elements which are used in the validate requirements activity and these elements are :

1. Identify Assumptions: the stakeholders might unknowingly make assumptions on the proposed solution and its functionalities.

This maybe due to their previous experience with similar solutions or the unknown bias that they might have because they want the solution to be successful.

For example, if a new product is being launched it might be difficult to gauge the stakeholders reaction to this product.

It might also be difficult to foresee any issues associated with the implementation of said product.

This can lead to assumptions based on what the product’s capabilities and these assumptions might be false.

So it is important to identify any assumptions and manage the expectations of the stakeholders.

2. Define Measurable Evaluation Criteria: implementing the solution is supposed to come with benefits to the organization but it might be difficult to measure these benefits if there is no evaluation criteria which can be used to do so.

So its the job of the business analyst to define the evaluation criteria which would be used to measure the success of the solution.

A baseline metric would have to be established based on the current state of the organization.

Then this baseline metric would be used to measure the performance of the solution and the future state of the process.

3. Evaluate Alignment with Solution Scope: Some solutions come with standard functionalities which are nice to have but these functionalities might been a solution requirement.

These functionalities should be considered for elimination because if the stakeholders keep on adding nice to have requirements to the requirements list, the future state of the solution would have to be reevaluated and the solution scope would also have to be changed.

This is because any changes made at a later stage in the life cycle of the project would have to be analyzed for its impact on the proposed solution.

So while it might be nice to include all the capabilities of the solution, it is more important to focused on the approved list requirements and to ensure that those requirements are implemented first.