When an organization requires a solution, 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 and designs have been specified and modeled they need to be verified.
The requirements need to be verified to ensure that they have been defined correctly, meet quality standards and can be used to fulfill the business need.
To verify the requirements, the stakeholders including the business analyst need to check the requirements to ensure that they are ready for validation.
The specification documents that are written by the business analyst has to be well written to ensure that all the stakeholders have a clear understanding of what is required and what they want to accomplish.
There are three elements that are used to verify requirements and they are:
1. Characteristics of requirements and designs quality: the requirements need to have the following characteristics to be considered good quality :
- Atomic : each requirement should be clearly understood independent of the other requirements.
- Complete: the requirements and designs should be complete to ensure that they can be used as a guide in fulfilling the solution.
- Consistent: each requirement and design should be consistent and they should not contradict the other requirements or designs.
- Concise: the requirements and designs should be detailed enough to be clearly understood by the stakeholders but they should not have unnecessary information.
- Feasible: the requirements and designs need to be achievable. This means that the risks of each solution needs to be outlined, the time frame has to be defined and the budget has to be stated.
- Unambiguous: the requirements have to be clearly stated in a way that describes how the solution would be fulfilled.
- Testable: each requirement and design has to be stated in a way that ensures that it can be tested for fulfillment.
- Prioritized: the requirements should be ranked and grouped based on their level of importance.
- Understandable: the requirements and designs should be clearly written in a language that would be understood by all the stakeholders.
2. Verification activities: the activities which would be used for verification should be performed throughout the life cycle of the project to ensure that they are still valid.
These are the verification activities:
a. Checking for organizational standards compliance.
b. Checking for the correct use of forms and modelling notations.
c. Checking for complete processes with each model.
d. Checking each process model against other process models.
e. Ensuring that the language being used in the documents is relevant to the audience and clearly understood.
f. Relevant examples are added to enhance clarity.
3. Checklists: the checklists are used by the business analysts to ensure quality control and capture any identified issues.
The checklist is also used to ensure that nothing important is missed and that steps required in the verification process are followed.
Once all these elements are applied to the documented requirements then they are ready for validation.