During the trawling and prototyping activities, the requirements you find are not always precise. They are ideas or intentions for requirements, and sometimes extremely vague and half-formed. By contrast, the requirements specification you intend to produce is the basis for the contract to build a product. As a consequence, it must contain clear, complete, and testable instructions about what has to be built. The task we tackle in this chapter is turning the half-formed ideas into precise statements of requirement. This translation is not always straightforward, and we have found it useful to have some help. To do so, we make use of a specification template and a requirements shell. The template is a ready-made guide to writing a specification, and the shell is the container for an individualwe shall call it an "atomic"requirement. Let's look first at the knowledge you are accumulating when producing a specification. |