Summary

Analyze requirements to ensure they are necessary and sufficient.

Description

As contractual requirements are defined, their relationship to customer requirements should be understood. In light of the operational concepts and scenarios, the contractual requirements are analyzed to determine whether they are necessary and sufficient to meet customer requirements. The analyzed requirements then provide the basis for more detailed and precise requirements throughout the project lifecycle.

Also, which key requirements will be used to track technical progress is determined. For instance, the weight of a product or size of a software product can be monitored through development based on its risk or its criticality to the customer or end user.

Refer to the Acquisition Technical Management (ATM) (CMMI-ACQ) process area for more information about conducting technical reviews.


Example Work Products



  1. Requirements defects reports
  2. Proposed requirements changes to resolve defects
  3. Key requirements
  4. Technical performance measures


Subpractices



1. Analyze stakeholder needs, expectations, constraints, and external interfaces to organize into related subjects and remove conflicts.

2. Analyze requirements to determine whether they satisfy higher level requirements.

3. Analyze requirements to ensure that they are complete, feasible, realizable, and verifiable.

4. Analyze and propose the allocation of requirements.

5. Identify key requirements that have a strong influence on cost, schedule, performance, or risk.

These key requirements often reflect cross-cutting (i.e., system-level) concerns and often address quality attributes that will be a major driver to a supplier’s architecture definition and evaluation activities. A clear understanding of such quality attributes (also known as “architecturally significant quality attributes”) and their importance based on mission or business needs is essential to an effective analysis of requirements and to effective technical performance measurement.



6. Identify technical performance measures to be tracked during the acquisition.

Technical performance measures are precisely defined measures based on a product requirement, product capability, or some combination of requirements and capabilities. Technical performance measures are chosen to monitor requirements and capabilities that are considered key factors in a product’s performance. Data for technical performance measures are provided by the supplier as specified in the supplier agreement.

Refer to the Measurement and Analysis (MA) (CMMI-ACQ) process area for more information about specifying measures.



7. Analyze operational concepts and scenarios to refine customer needs, constraints, and interfaces and to discover new requirements.

This analysis can result in more detailed operational concepts and scenarios as well as support the derivation of new requirements.