8.1.1 The Use of Planguage to Improve Requirement Specifications

I believe that most current requirement specifications lack clarity, and are very poor in their supporting information. We need to make requirement specifications ‘work harder’ by adding more ‘background’ to the requirements By ‘background’ I mean information related to the requirement that is not the core requirement itself. The background information I am referring to includes: prioritization (expressed by such means as ‘Justification’), risk management (expressed using such means as ‘Assumptions’), change management (for example, the integration requirements), and quality control (for example, the testability requirements). To improve requirement specification, I have developed a requirement specification language, as a subset of my planning language, ‘Planguage‘. This language has developed by practical need, in international industry over three decades, and is supplemented here with some recent ideas. This paper will give an overview of the conceptual basis and some sample detail.