Re: A question about requirements

[Harald Tveit Alvestrand <harald@alvestrand.no>]

--On 22. september 2003 10:21 -0700 Bob Hinden <hinden@iprg.nokia.com> 
wrote:

> I agree that writing a requirement documents is a good way for the working
> group to agree on what the problem is they are tasked to solve.  I think
> there is starting to be a lot of experience that completing the
> requirements document and publishing it as an Info RFC is not worth the
> effort.  I am starting to think that most requirements documents should be
> "working" documents and never be published as RFCs.

my somewhat facile remark about requirements documents this month is that a 
good requirements document should be something like 4 pages - large enough 
for anyone to read to figure out what the effort's supposed to help with, 
short enough that people will actually read it.

But I suspect that the effort to write and get consensus on a short 
document is often larger than the effort to write a long one, so this might 
not be helpful. (Can you imagine a WG agreeing on a 4-page requirements 
document for requirements documents? :-)

                         Harald