- The Requirements Process in Context
- A Case Study
- Project Blastoff
- Trawling for Requirements
- Quick and Dirty Modeling
- Scenarios
- Writing the Requirements
- Quality Gateway
- Reusing Requirements
- Reviewing the Requirements
- Iterative and Incremental Processes
- Requirements Retrospective
- Evolution of Requirements
- The Template
- The Snow Card
- Your Own Requirements Process
- Formality Guide
- The Rest of This Book
Reusing Requirements
The requirements for any product you build are never completely unique. We suggest that before starting on any new requirements project, you go through the specifications written for previous projects and look for potentially reusable material. Sometimes you may find dozens of requirements that you can reuse without alteration. More often you will find requirements that, although they are not exactly what you want, are suitable as the basis for some of the requirements you will write in the new project.
For example, in the IceBreaker project, the rules for road engineering have not changed much over the years. Thus, the requirements analysts working on various projects do not have to rediscover them, but can simply reuse them. They also know that the business of vehicle scheduling does not change radically over time, so their trawling process can take advantage of some requirements from previous projects.
Similarly, for different projects within your organization, the non-functional requirements are fairly standard, so you can start with a specification from one of the previous projects and use it as a checklist.
The point about reusing requirements is that once a requirement has been successfully specified for a product, and the product itself is successful, the requirement does not have to be reinvented or rediscovered. In Chapter 15, Reusing Requirements, we discuss how you can take advantage of the knowledge that already exists within your organization, and how you can save yourself time by recycling requirements from previous projects.