Task Descriptions as Functional Requirements

  • Authors:
  • Soren Lauesen

  • Affiliations:
  • -

  • Venue:
  • IEEE Software
  • Year:
  • 2003

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Abstract

Many IT systems fail to satisfy business goals or support users efficiently, even when the system meets written requirements. Why? Usually because the requirements rather arbitrarily specify what a system shall do, and barely consider its context. Stakeholders cannot check that such requirements meet expectations. To remedy this situation, the Tasks & Support approach uses task descriptions that specify what the user and computer shall accomplish together without being explicit about who performs which parts of a task. The requirement is simply to support the identified tasks. Stakeholders can easily validate and later verify such requirements. This approach is just as successful for product development and large-scale work restructuring as it is for buying commercial off-the-shelf products. Although the resulting requirements are of higher quality than traditional requirements, they are much faster to produce.