Managing Software Requirements: A Unified Approach

Chapter 8. The Features of a Product or System

Key Points

• The development team needs to play a more active role in eliciting the requirements for the system.

• Product or system features are high-level expressions of desired system behavior.

• System features should be limited to 25–99, with fewer than 50 preferred.

• Attributes provide additional information about a feature.

Given some of the problems we've described in the earlier chapters, it seems clear that the development team is rarely, if ever, handed a perfect, or perhaps even reasonable, specification to use as the basis for system development. In Chapter 7, we learned about the reasons for this. One conclusion we can draw is that if we are not going to be given better definitions, we are going ...