The Inscrutable Jungle of Quality Criteria – How to Formulate Requirements for a Successful Product Development

Abstract

The steady consideration of requirements during the development of new products remains one of the most difficult and challenging tasks in every development process. Within these considerations, quality criteria are existing for the structured formulation and documentation of requirements in requirements lists. Existing approaches focus on the completeness of requirements during the product development process. But contrarily, the effectiveness and efficiency of product development processes are mainly influenced by a structurally conducted and systematic requirement acquisition and requirements documentation to form a reliable base for the entire development process and to support development of optimised products in special applications. The paper presents the results of a systematic literature analysis of existing quality criteria for the formulation of requirements. Often, quality criteria are not assigned with precise definitions for a clear conceptual understanding. They allow a large room for interpretation, for which reason they cannot be used as a uniform base for a systematic requirements documentation. However, quality criteria are partially competitive and even occasionally contradictory. Every developer who is involved in the acquisition and documentation of requirements is lost in the inscrutable jungle of quality criteria. In addition, the quality criteria are unstructured according to their content and formal structure. Furthermore, the paper offers a systematic and critically reflected reduction of existing quality criteria for the formulation and documentation of requirements that are differentiated according to content and formal structure of requirements. The paper provides a compacted spectrum of quality criteria without synonymously used quality criteria, underpinned with a differentiated conceptual understanding and prioritisation of each relevant quality criterion. Thus, a valuable base for the formally supported requirements documentation in the requirements list is provid- ed.

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