Eliciting Requirements: Beyond the Blank Sheet of Paper

Actions in the requirements phase can directly impact the success or failure of a project. It is critical that project management utilize all available tools to identify potential problems and risks as early in the development as possible, especially in the requirements phase. The Software Assurance Technology Center (GSFC) and the Quality Assurance Division at NASA Goddard Space Flight Center are working on developing and applying metrics from the onset of project development, starting in the requirements phase. This talk will discuss the results of a metrics effort on a real, large system development at GSFC and lessons learned from this experience. The development effort for this project uses an automated tool to manage requirements decomposition. This report focuses on the metrics used to assess the requirement decomposition effort and to identify potential risks. The objective of the requirement assessment was to: determine how requirements were being distributed across planned releases, determine to which release the most requirements were allocated, and characterize the expansion of requirements from one level to the next. This report illustrates the requirement metrics development and its application with examples from a large software development effort and shows how the derived metrics were used to identify some areas of project risk. This report discusses how metric analysis in the requirements phase can be accomplished on any government or industry project. The use of an automated tool to manage requirement development facilitation of metrics for improved insight into development and risk assessment will also be expanded.