A method for assessing confidence in requirements analysis

Abstract Context During development managers, analysts and designers often need to know whether enough requirements analysis work has been done and whether or not it is safe to proceed to the design stage. Objective This paper describes a new, simple and practical method for assessing our confidence in a set of requirements. Method We identified four confidence factors and used a goal oriented framework with a simple ordinal scale to develop a method for assessing confidence. We illustrate the method and show how it has been applied to a real systems development project. Results We show how assessing confidence in the requirements could have revealed problems in this project earlier and so saved both time and money. Conclusion Our meta-level assessment of requirements provides a practical and pragmatic method that can prove useful to managers, analysts and designers who need to know when sufficient requirements analysis has been performed.