Customer to Requirements

Customer reports are triaged into categories. Some will be treated as defects in the product.

Defect reports must be prioritized and fed back into the development cycle at the appropriate point. For example, critical defects can be sent directly to development for action while defects with low impact can be sent to design specification group for consideration.

Many customer requests are valuable inputs to the product management, analysis, and requirements gathering process.

All customer reports must be captured in a database, typically one that is optimized for the purpose, called a defect tracking system.

Requirements to Implementation

Published project requirements can be compared to system features as described in functional specification artifacts.

An implementation must address the published requirements. All requirements must be represented by some part of the implementation.

An implementation may and often will include elements that are not described in detail by the requirements. While it is not necessary for the requirements to include all features of the implementation in detail, it is recommended that requirements be compared to the implementation to identify any extraneous functions.

Both product management (or business analysis) and engineering must sign off to confirm the congruence of requirements and specifications.

Initial Requirements

The documents that define the initial requirements for a project have their basis outside the project. These documents are the major source of information from the natural world to the project.