4 Criteria for Good Requirements

Brad Egeland is an IT/project management consultant and author with over 25 years of software development, management and project management experience leading initiatives in manufacturing, government contracting, gaming and hospitality, retail operations, aviation and airline, pharmaceutical, start-ups, healthcare, higher education, not-for-profit, high-tech, engineering and general IT.

  Manufacturing   Requirements Management   ProjectsAtWork  

What makes a requirement a good requirement? Good requirements generally meet four basic criteria: they address a specific need; they are verifiable; they are attainable; and they are clear.

The quality of your requirements can make or break a project. Good requirements give the project leader and team control over project development and prevent rework. Less rework means the project has a much better chance at on time and on budget delivery. All that adds up to project success and high customer satisfaction.

So what makes a requirement a good requirement? Good requirements generally meet four basic criteria: they address a specific need; they are verifiable; they are attainable; and they are clear.

Let’s look at these criteria in more detail:

Specific need. A requirement is a basically a statement of something someone needs. The “something” is a product or solution that performs a service or function. The “someone” may be a company, a user, a customer, support, testers, or another product.

For example, a company needs a manufacturing machine that stamps out widgets, or they need a certain plastic to feed a manufacturing machine that they already have. A bank must process debit card transactions. Alternatively, a requirement is a statement of a characteristic of something someone needs. Proceeding with these examples …

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