How do you conduct requirement reviews and inspections with your team and clients?

1 What are requirement reviews and inspections?

Requirement reviews and inspections are formal or informal methods of evaluating requirements documents and models. This includes examining the requirements against predefined criteria and discussing them with stakeholders, such as the project team, clients, users, or experts. The purpose of these reviews and inspections is to detect and correct errors, improve clarity, completeness, and accuracy, confirm feasibility, usability, and testability, and ensure alignment with the project scope, objectives, and constraints. Ultimately, they are used to obtain feedback and approval from stakeholders on the requirements.

2 How to prepare for requirement reviews and inspections?

Before conducting requirement reviews and inspections, it is necessary to plan and prepare for them. This includes defining the purpose, scope, and objectives of the review or inspection, selecting the appropriate method, technique, and tool for the review or inspection, identifying the roles and responsibilities of the participants, scheduling the time, date, and location of the review or inspection, distributing the requirements documents and models to the participants in advance, providing the participants with the review or inspection criteria, checklist, or guidelines, and training them on how to perform the review or inspection effectively and efficiently.

3 How to conduct requirement reviews and inspections?

When conducting requirement reviews and inspections, you must follow certain steps, such as beginning the session with an introduction and overview of the requirements. Then you should review or inspect the requirements, using criteria, checklists, or guidelines. After that, record any errors, defects, issues, questions, comments, or suggestions that you find. Afterwards, discuss the findings with the participants and reach a consensus on how to resolve them. Moreover, document the results and outcomes of the review or inspection; this includes the number and type of findings, the actions taken or planned, the approval status, and the recommendations. Finally, follow up on the actions and verify that all findings are resolved and the requirements improved.

5 How to verify and validate requirements?

Verification and validation of requirements can be performed using various methods and techniques, such as reviews, inspections, analysis, testing, prototyping, simulation, or demonstration. The choice of verification and validation methods is affected by several factors, such as the type and complexity of the requirements, the availability of information and data, the maturity of tools and technologies, the skills and experience of resources, as well as cost, time, and quality constraints.