Flashback: A Year Ago This Week on Tyner Blain [2006-02-10]

Using ROI For Requirements Is A Risky Business

We’ve talked repeatedly about using ROI to drive prioritization of requirements based upon value. ROI can be used as the basis for prioritization for all decision making.

If we fail to take risk into account, our calculations will certainly be wrong, and we may make a poor decision. When we talk about accounting for risk in this context, we mean that we are accounting for the unlikely, undesired, or unintentional outcomes. We use the term expected value to refer to the risk adjusted approximation of the outcome. In financial circles, this is also called discounting.

The most common mistake people make when calculating ROI is failing to take into account the expected value of the return or the expected value of the cost of a project.

MRD To PRD Requirements Conversion

A real world example of converting from an MRD to a PRD. This is the process of translating from a market-requirements view of the product to a product-requirements view of the product.

Writing Functional Requirements To Support Use Cases

In our previous post, Sample use case examples, we created two informal use cases. The use cases were written to support product requirements defined as part of a project to reduce test suite maintenace costs. In this post, we will define functional requirements that support these use cases. This process is an example of using structured requirements, applied to a small real world project.