The Volere Requirements Specification Template

Thousands of good requirements specifications have already been written. Your task of writing another one becomes easier if you make constructive use of some of the existing good specifications.

The Volere Requirements Specification Template was made by "standing on the shoulders of giants." Your authors borrowed useful components from specifications of many successfully built products, and packaged the best of them into a reusable template that can form the foundation of your requirements specifications.

"Bernard of Chartres used to say that we are like dwarfs on the shoulders of giants, so that we can see more than they, and things at a greater distance, not by virtue of any sharpness of sight on our part, or any physical distinction, but because we are carried high and raised up by their giant size."

Source: John of Salisbury

The Volere Requirements Specification Template is found in appendix B. This chapter will refer frequently to the template.

The Volere template is a compartmentalized container for requirements. We examined requirements documents and categorized their requirements into types that prove useful for the purpose of recognition and elicitation. Each of the types is allocated to a section of the template. The template's table of contents lists these types:

Project Drivers

1. The Purpose of the Project

2. The Client, the Customer, and Other Stakeholders

3. Users of the Product

Project Constraints

4. Mandated Constraints

5. Naming Conventions and Definitions

6. Relevant Facts and Assumptions

Functional Requirements

7. The Scope of the Work

8. The Scope of the Product

9. Functional and Data Requirements

Nonfunctional Requirements

10. Look and Feel Requirements

11. Usability and Humanity Requirements

12. Performance Requirements

13. Operational and Environmental Requirements

14. Maintainability and Support Requirements

15. Security Requirements

16. Cultural and Political Requirements

17. Legal Requirements

Project Issues

18. Open Issues

19. Off-the-Shelf Solutions

20. New Problems

21. Tasks

22. Migration to the New Product

23. Risks

24. Costs

25. User Documentation and Training

26. Waiting Room

27. Ideas for Solutions

The template is set out in five main divisions. First come the project drivers. These factors cause the project to be undertaken in the first place. Drivers are such things as the purpose of the projectwhy you are involved in gathering the requirements for a product, and who wants or needs that product.

Next are project constraints. These issues have a strong influence on the requirements and the outcome for the product. The constraints are written into the specification at blastoff time, although you may have some mechanism in place for determining them earlier.

Think of these first two sections as setting the scene for the requirements that are to follow.

The next two divisions deal with the requirements for the product. Both the functional requirements and the nonfunctional requirements are explained here. Each requirement is described to a level of detail such that the product's constructors know precisely what to build to satisfy the business need and what benchmark is relevant for testing each capability of the delivered product.

The final division of the template deals with project issues. These are not requirements for the product, but rather issues that must be faced if the product is to become a reality. This part of the template also contains a "waiting room"a place to store requirements not intended for the initial release of the product.