Other Considerations

Requirements fundamentals

Requirements have been a thorny issue for decades. Agile has contributed useful practices to the requirements canon, but it has not changed the importance of high-quality requirements.

In Sequential development, requirements issues were conspicuous because the aggregate inefficiency was experienced all at once, cumulatively, at the end of the project. On a year-long project, if poor requirements contributed 10% inefficiency to a project, the project would be more than a month late. That pain is difficult to ignore.

In Agile development, the pain of poorly defined requirements is metabolized in smaller increments, more frequently, over the course of a project. A team experiencing 10% inefficiency from poorly defined requirements might re-do a story every few sprints. That doesn’t seem as painful because the pain isn’t borne all at once, but the cumulative inefficiency can be just as significant.

When performing reviews and retrospectives, Agile teams should be especially attentive to requirements issues. A team that finds that it’s misunderstanding user stories should consider a focused effort to improve its requirements skills.

A discussion of detailed requirements practices is outside this course’s scope, but you can check your knowledge with the self-assessment below. If most of the terms are unfamiliar to you, recognize that software requirements is now a well-developed discipline and many good techniques are available.