Industry Standards and Frameworks
I.
Requirement Types
A.
Professional requirements practice classifies requirements into types:
- 1.Business requirements·why the organization needs this
- 2.Stakeholder requirements·what a specific group needs
- 3.Functional requirements·what the system must do
- 4.Non-functional requirements·qualities like performance, availability, or security the system must have
This classification, used throughout the BABOK Guide and in most enterprise requirements templates, gives a new OFA a mental checklist: when documenting a need, it is worth asking which type of requirement is being captured, since business and functional requirements are frequently confused early on.
II.
A Quality Standard for Requirements
- A.A widely used quality standard for a well-written requirement, adapted from IEEE and BABOK guidance, is that it should be clear, unambiguous, verifiable, and traceable back to a stated need.
- B."The system should be fast" fails this standard; "the system must return search results within two seconds for 95 percent of queries" meets it.
- C.An OFA 1 is not expected to write requirements at this level of precision unsupervised, but should recognize the gap between the two examples on sight.