Outside Wisdom posted on July 06, 2009 00:38
If requirements management practices were songs entering a popularity contest, requirements validation would hardly be a favorite contender. It's easy to understand why: validation is usually a tedious, time consuming task, and, as with nearly every quality control activity, it is supposed to reveal defects, going against our natural desire of being right, not making mistakes, and singing in tune.
Even within the field of quality control, validation is typically a relegated concept. Many software standards and industry practices focus almost entirely on verification activities, such as integration testing and code inspections. Verification is important to determine whether the product meets the established requirements, but despite its lack of appeal, validation is a crucial step to ensure that the requirements themselves are correct and satisfy business and user needs.
Several validation techniques are available for determining that requirements are "in tune"--free from ambiguities, inconsistencies, redundancies, omissions, and other problems that will prevent them from being a reliable foundation for design and for final system verification. These techniques include informal reviews, requirements inspection, prototyping, and requirements testing, among others.
Author: Adriana Beal
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