5 Part 5: V-Modell Reference Work Products

5.3 Products

5.3.7 Requirements and Analyses

5.3.7.6 Requirements Evaluation

Process module: Specification of Requirements

Responsible: Requirements Engineer (Acquirer) (when using process module Specification of Requirements)

Activity: Preparing Requirements Evaluation

Participating: User, Executive, Project Leader

Work Product Attributes: initial

Purpose

The »Requirements Evaluation is intended to evaluate the collection and preparation of user requirements and make the supplier's realization risk as transparent and controllable as possible. When the contract is awarded, the acquirer has - based on his evaluation capabilities - already determined whether he regards the user requirements as technically feasible, affordable, economical and important.

If the requirements are economically doubtful or expensive or cannot be assessed adequately, the acquirer may take recourse to an optioning of capabilities, i.e., the requesting of capabilities or capability packages to be offered optionally, in order to base his assessment on real cost data.

The product Requirements Evaluation documents the evaluation results for the user requirements collected until that time. The evaluation is hardly possible unless the »Outline of the Life Cycle and the Overall System Architecture or a concrete system architecture have been prepared, i.e., there are already possible approaches. An evaluation of off-the-shelf products may make valuable contributions to this.

The Requirements Evaluation is based on prespecified evaluation criteria. The results of the Requirements Evaluation are integrated into the product Requirements Specification.

Depends on

Requirements Specification, Market Survey for Off-the-Shelf Products (see product dependency 5.2)

5.3.7.6.1 Evaluation Criteria

This subject specifies the evaluation criteria to be applied during the »Requirements Evaluation or »Evaluation of the Overall Project Requirements Specification. The evaluation criteria include, but are not limtied to, the plausibulity of the defined requirements, particularly the information security requirements, the possiblity of controlling the complexity and the evaulation of the possibility to employ off-the-shelf products. Additional criteria include the existing IT infrastructure and the cost estimate for the individual requirements.

5.3.7.6.2 Evaluation Results

The evaluation results of the »Requirements Evaluation include particularly an overall evaluation of user requirements. It will be evaluated how far prespecified restrictions, which are either due to the budget, the schedule or available resources, can be complied with or will be exceeded. In addition, all user requirements collected will be examined and classified as follows: The deferred user requirements and the rationale for deferring them will be examined (e.g., is the necessity not demonstrable). The modified user requirements and the rationale for the modification will be examined (e.g., by the more economical use of off-the-shelf products). The necessity of new user requirements will be examined (e.g., have important non-functional user requirements not been recorded). In addition, the evaluation results include results of the economic analysis, e.g. cost-benefit assessments, identification of cost-driving user requirements and affordability of user requirements.