Levels of Requirements

Recently I joined a new company. I switched from an US giant MNC to an Indian giant MNC. So everything was new and that is the reason I am publishing my new blog after a long break. I was busy with those shifting activities and other stuffs to make me comfortable. So, let's come to business.

I will start this blog with one of my latest encounter. This time not with the development team (as usual) but with my test team member. Some times back, I asked with one of my tester a very basic question. The question was - What are the documents that you required to start the testing or at least start writing test cases? The answer was - Requirement documents. Then I continue my questioning and asked further -which type of "Requirement documents". I got the answer - "Requirement Documents, Sanat. You don't know what a requirement document is". I keep smiling and said "There are three types of requirement documents - Business Requirements, User Requirements and Functional Requirements. What do you want?” No answer from my counterpart.

Now the key point is that in today's business environment, the requirements can be (or should be) divided into three parts or you can say three phases:

1. Business Requirements
2. User Requirements
3. Functional Requirements

Business Requirement: What is the business perspective of this requirement? This requirement can be a single line also. For example: There is an attendance system in an office where each and every employee has to enter in a register placed in the security. Now I want to automate this process or make it convenient for the employees. In that case, the business requirement would be "Need to automate the attendance process and make it convenient for the employees". This is a single line Business Requirement that is required in this scenario. This requirement can also be elaborated depends upon other matrices.

User Requirement: How the user will interact with the system or what are the user requirements as compared to the business requirement? As the example goes on. In User Requirement, the things that should be covered are - "How the employee will enter the attendance automatically? How the user will interact with the proposed system? What are the most convenient ways to exchange the interactions between user and the system?". And lots of other things also.

Functional Requirement: How the system will be made? What are the functions required to fulfill the user requirements? In this phase, everything related to the development of the Business requirement and user requirement is mentioned.

So to start doing testing, I think Business Requirements should be clear in your mind and based on User Requirements and Functional Requirements, testing can be started.

-- Sanat Sharma