Seven steps toward regulatory excellence – Step 2 – Requirements Attributes

By: Simone Bernardi, Anders Ekman, Celeris AB

The hidden understructure

Looking at following quote from Ms. Agnes Denes from the viewpoint of a regulatory expert (or requirement analyst) you would be at least puzzled, if not irritated, reading that, in a 2015 interview, when asked about her ecological site work “the living pyramids” (presented at Docrates Part, Queens) the famous, New York based, artist stated that:

“I hate to put tags on things, because tagschange, and they change with therequirements made on them.”

(A. Denes, 2015)

Reason being, you actually know about “… to put tags on things…” (in your case to assign attributes to requirements) to be a key success factor in products’ and projects’ delivery, enabling an efficient and effective requirements management. But, putting this statement into perspective (by reading the entire interview) you would perhaps change your mind. Ms. Denes, with her statement attempted to explain how, despite her willingness to always use new expressions (as things are continuously evolving), she could not resist from underlying the importance of pyramids as a persistent concept. She viewed pyramids as social structures, representative of concepts which stand on hidden understructures, the understructure of thinking. With her creations, Ms. Denes purposely beautified the overstructure of the pyramids (their exterior) to capture the public’s attention, and induce people to think, imagine, and brainstorm about the hidden understructure, the hidden underpinning.

Regulatory documents as artwork

In the spirit of Ms. Denes, regulatory documents might sometimes appear as “beautiful” art pieces, with practitioners at first stuck “admiring” them from the outside, and secondly, forced into a difficult navigation and intensive thinking to understand their understructure. It is here requirements attributes comes into play. There is value in “tagging” (regulatory) requirements, to make them accessible, navigable, and as to ease their management in product development. By introducing a simple, well thought, and coherent set of attributes, requirement analysts can transform regulatory documents into a set of easily accessible requirements, ready to be interpreted and mapped to a company’s products. Or, in the spirit of the “living pyramids”, making the work of an artist more easily accessible to a wider interested audience.

Step 2 – Requirements Attributes

Once the (regulatory) requirements have been properly identified, it is then time to classify them. This is usually best done by attaching a selected set of requirements attributes to them. According to Wheatcraft et al. (2016) requirements attributes is a set of information which help the management of the requirement. In the “tagging” of regulatory documents first attribute worth considering should target the distinction between true regulatory requirements, from headers, side notes, and additional information.

Regulatory requirements differ from other types of requirements in a few aspects, one being that the distinction into Must, Should, and Could is less useful, as regulatory requirements tend to belong to the “Must” category. There are other attributes worth considering, like: Priority, Assigned to, Target Sprint, Estimation of Size, Effort Remaining, and Completion Status. Domain and regulation specific attributes should be considered as well. Attributes can generate value but come at cost, as they need to be maintained over time. It is consequently important to carefully think about the benefits, added value, and use cases for each new attribute that gets introduced in your database, as to limit the number of attributes to the strictly needed ones.

References: Wheatcraft, Louis & Ryan, Mike & Dick, Jeremy. (2016). On the Use of Attributes to Manage Requirements. Systems Engineering. 19. 10.1002/sys.2136.

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