The Volere ©Process

Volere is the outcome of many years of practice, consulting and research in requirements engineering and its premise is that user requirements are tested before they are admitted to a specification.

The requirements are the desired effects to be achieved by the software. Someone has to think up those effects. The first test is to determine if you can quantify the requirement by specifying its fit criterion. This fit criterion is an objective measure of the requirement's meaning; it is the criterion for evaluating whether or not a given solution fits the requirement. If a fit criterion cannot be adequately specified, then the requirement is ambiguous, or ill understood.

If there is no fit criterion, then there is no way of knowing if a solution matches the user requirement.

Getting the requirements right, up front, reduces development time overall as the cost of good requirements gathering is minor compared to the cost of poor requirements. Poor requirements result in a poor quality product. Without the correct requirements we cannot construct the correct product for our customers.

What does this mean for our customers?

This approach encourages all stakeholders to think about making their requirements testable and therefore changes the way that they think about requirements - for the better!

The Volere process takes the guesswork out of product design process and enables the development team at Shire to convert "what the customer really wants" into successful, appropriate and workable systems.