“Filling in the blanks”

Poor requirements management is often detrimental to estimation of project effort, duration, and costs. Various problems in eliciting and specifying requirements during estimation, such as ambiguous requirements at various levels of granularity and limited attention to nonfunctional requirements, lead to underestimates or estimation error larger than expected. To address these issues, we propose a “fill in the blanks” solution based on a tailoring of the Quality Function Deployment technique we name QF2D (Quality Factor through Quality Function Deployment), which utilizes the latest ISO standards and empirical evidence from industry practices. More specifically, QF2D focuses on requirements based on measurable entities (e.g., organization, project, resources, process, product levels). This chapter illustrates the application of the proposed solution to portability, one of the ISO 25010 characteristics. It also includes a discussion of the approach including implications for research and practice, as well as a sample calculation to illustrate how the technique works to provide added value.