The goal of requirements evaluation is to seek out and correct problems before resources are committed to implementing the requirements. It is concerned with examining the requirements to certify that they meet the stakeholders’ intentions, and to ensure that they define the right system, the essence of the agreement and understandings between developer and acquirer about what to build, in a manner that ensures a common understanding across the project team and among the stakeholders.
Attributes that need to be look for when assessing a requirement specification are,
- Complete – All that is needed is indeed described
- Unambiguous – That there is no scope for making assumptions
- Testable – That it is clean what ‘Correctness’ is
- Consistent – That the similar behaviors, looks & feel, usage are uniform
A testable requirement simply means that it is an unambiguously possible to state whether it failed all passed after executing it. In the context of attributes, test-ability implies that each attribute does indeed have a clear measure/metric.