Tuesday, February 8, 2011

What is a Requirement

What is a requirement,

A) A condition or capability needed by a stakeholder to sovle a problem or achieve an objective.


For example lets assume that a teller at a bank's front desk needs to enter customer name into the system. In this scenario,
Objective: Enter Customer Name
Capability: System should have a place to enter name
The capability becomes the requirement.

B) A requirement is a condition/ Capability that must be met or possessed by a solution or solution componenet to satisfy a contact, standard, sepcification or other formally imposed documents.
For example regulations mandate to verify the customer name for any financial institutions. Thus in the above example when the teller enters the name into the system. The system should verify the identity of the customer.
Regulation: Perform identity verification.
Requirement: The system should perform Identity verfication.
A requirement can either rise due to part (A) or part (B)