Role: Requirements Specifier
This role specifies and maintains the detailed system requirements.
Role Sets:  Analysts
Relationships
Main Description

Different aspects of the requirements are typically documented in different types of software requirements work products; as such the requirements will usually be defined in multiple work products. A person playing this role may be responsible for many of those work products.

In the systems engineering context, the Requirements Specifier produces "black-box" use-case descriptions, which specify what the system does, without revealing information about system internals. In systems engineering the concern is also with the flow-down of nonfunctional requirements to subsystems, and the Requirements Specifier uses the supplementary specifications to drive refinement of the allocation of nonfunctional requirements, for example, performance requirements, to use-cases. 

Staffing
Skills

A person acting in this role needs good communication skills, both in terms of expressing themselves verbally and in writing. Knowledge of the business and technology domain is also important, but is not typically necessary for every project team member acting in this role.

For this role to be carried out efficiently, the person playing this role needs to be familiar with the productivity tools used to capture the results of the requirements work.

For systems engineering, good domain knowledge is definitely required, to enable informed choices about actor-system use-case association refinements (as part of the emerging system context definition). The Requirements Specifier also needs a good working knowledge of systems engineering techniques, as a basis for reasoning about the allocation of nonfunctional requirements to use cases. 

Assignment Approaches

This role can be assigned in the following ways:

  • Assign one or more staff members to perform the role only. This works well in large teams, particularly in situations where there are domain experts available who have significant domain knowledge to specify appropriate requirements.
  • Assign one or more staff members to perform both this role and the Role: Test Analyst. This strategy is a good option for small to mid-sized test teams, and is often used where domain experts are available to play both roles. You need to be careful that appropriate effort is devoted to satisfying both of these roles.