TABLE OF CONTENTS Peter Morris, having studied numerous projects in the US and UK covering the period from 1940 to 1990, identifies that one of the major causes of project problems is that our current management and engineering culture consistently fails sufficiently to articulate requirements or cope with change in them (Morris 1994).
More recently, in 2001, having conducted a thorough review of the recent systems engineering industry literature, Ralph Young concludes that the causes of project failure are ineffective practices for handling requirements. He estimates the necessary improvements in such practices could be financed by approximately one third of the current total cost of project failures. Additional gains would be that customer satisfaction and the quality of results would also improve (Young 2001).
You probably feel that you need to ask more probing questions about the project requirements that you are working on. You are likely, unfortunately, to be able safely to assume that nobody in your senior management and none of your customers has a well-developed sense of exactly what requirements they really want or need. They may all have the dangerous illusion that they do. However, they are unlikely to have a clear enough requirement specification. Nor are they likely to have requirement ideas which are shared precisely by all their colleagues and the other stakeholders.
Requirements give information to the system designers and to a wide range of stakeholders. They state what the stakeholders want the...
