Requirements Management is a relatively mature discipline with many well-known methods and techniques for identifying, gathering, analysing, specifying, managing, verifying, and validating a system’s requirements. But if that is so, why are there still so many defects in requirements specifications? Why are requirements mistakes still a major root cause of significant cost and schedule overruns and project failures?

In practice, the actual quality of many specified requirements is poor. These requirements do not exhibit the accepted properties that should characterize all well engineered requirements. This has cascading impact on downstream activities resulting in reworks, retests, schedule and time overruns, poor quality and in some cases, failure to roll out.  

Requirements gathering & development is the first engineering activity during which major mistakes can be made, and the negative consequences of these mistakes are felt during all downstream activities such as architecting, design, implementation, and testing. Poor-quality requirements greatly increase development and sustainment costs and often cause major schedule overruns.

The BATM paradigm (Test Management overlapping BA tasks – BATM for short)) has been applied to Requirements process whereby testing team are actively engaged in the Requirements process. Business Analysts from the Testing teams who have deep domain knowledge and who are conversant with QA and testing methodology are engaged up front in the Requirement phase of the SDLC. This ensures not only that requirements are written in a granular and detailed manner but also ensures that testing is prioritized to focus on what’s important, and be as efficient as possible to perform the maximum amount of testing. 

This approach helps to catch early defects and filter them out before entering next phase of development cycle thereby additionally eliminating cascading impact of defects affecting quality in next & subsequent phases