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Wednesday, November 12, 2014 - 1:30pm - 2:30pm
Business Analysis & Requirements
BW6

EARS: The Easy Approach to Requirements Syntax

One key to specifying effective functional requirements is minimizing misinterpretation and ambiguity. By employing a consistent syntax in your requirements, you can improve readability and help ensure that everyone on the team understands exactly what to develop. John Terzakis provides examples of typical requirements and explains how to improve them using the Easy Approach to Requirements Syntax (EARS). EARS provides a simple yet powerful method of capturing the nuances of functional requirements. John explains that you need to identify two distinct types of requirements. Ubiquitous requirements state a fundamental property of the software that always occurs; non-ubiquitous requirements depend on the occurrence of an event, error condition, state, or option. Learn and practice identifying the correct requirements type and restating those requirements with the corresponding syntax. Join John to find out what’s wrong with the requirements statement—“The software shall warn of low battery”—and how to fix it.

John Terzakis, Intel

John Terzakis has more than twenty-five years of experience developing, writing, and testing software. With Intel for fourteen years, John is currently a staff engineer working with teams on enhancing product requirements to reduce planning and development times, reduce defects, and improve overall product quality. He is a certified Intel instructor for Requirements Engineering courses. John’s prior experience includes director and manager roles with Shiva, Racal InterLan, and Dataproducts. He was also a member of the technical staff at Bell Labs.

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