requirementscriteria

Requirements criteria refer to the standards and conditions used to judge a requirement during the software and systems development lifecycle. They define what makes a requirement well formed, feasible, verifiable, and valuable to stakeholders, and they help guide elicitation, analysis, specification, and validation.

Effective criteria promote clarity, completeness, consistency, and traceability. Desired attributes include clarity (unambiguous language), conciseness, verifiability (the ability to confirm the requirement by observable evidence), feasibility (feasible within constraints), necessity, and the ability to be prioritized and traced to design elements and tests.

Criteria fall into several categories. Quality criteria concern nonfunctional aspects such as performance, reliability, security, and usability. Business criteria reflect stakeholder value, risk, cost, and return on investment. Regulatory and compliance criteria ensure adherence to laws and standards. Acceptance criteria describe how a requirement will be tested and accepted, often expressed as testable statements.

In practice, requirements criteria are applied through techniques such as SMART criteria, verification and validation plans, acceptance tests, and traceability matrices. Decision matrices and quality attribute workshops can help compare competing requirements against defined criteria.

During requirements engineering, criteria guide elicitation, analysis, specification, validation, and change management. They support prioritization, risk assessment, and the identification of gaps between needs and proposed solutions.

Example: a requirement might be accompanied by acceptance criteria stating that a feature must respond within 2 seconds under typical load, remain functional under load spikes, and produce verifiable logs for audit purposes.

Common challenges include ambiguity in wording, conflicting criteria across stakeholders, scope changes, and balancing competing quality attributes.

See also: Requirements engineering, acceptance criteria, nonfunctional requirements, traceability.