Requirement Breakdown Structure (RBS)

We know that to completely and clearly document requirements at the beginning of a project has never really happened. The problem is not with the process. The problem is that the world and our brain are not static. It never has been and never will be. There must be better ways. And there are! So, requirements should be developed such a way that are changeable and manageable. In this post I’ll try to share requirement development technique or Requirement Breakdown Structure, the foundation of all great project management.

Basically in requirement phase we do the following activities:

• Identify the source of requirements
• Take preparation for requirement collection
• Collect the requirements
• Develop the requirements
• Verify and validate the requirements

Requirement breakdown is the part of requirement development activity. But this is a challenge for ensuring that requirement breakdown is good enough or understandable and manageable, because breakdown of the requirements vary person to person.

In my opinion the best way to break the requirements is, keep it small, define the acceptance criteria of each requirement, define the relationship between requirements and then encourage the users to correct, improve and baseline them. Acceptance criterion is the key technique here. Try to write the acceptance criteria for each of the requirement then you will see requirement will be automatically small, understandable and manageable.