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Requegesis


Requegesis is the critical interpretation of requirements. It’s at the same time an art and methodical approach to understand history, origin, background (also cultural), criticality and validity of requirements. The goal of requegesis is to find the best functional response to requirements while taking liberty in their interpretation.

The word “requegesis” itself is a portmanteau - a linguistic blend - of the two words “requirement” and “exegesis”. The first part of the word “requ” is used in the traditional sense of the "singular documented physical and functional need that a particular design, product or process must be able to perform". The second part of the word exegesis (from the greek “to lead out”) is the “critical explanation or interpretation of a text, particularly a religious text. “

I think exegesis with the connotation of being used for religious texts underlines the way some requirements being treated as sacrosanct rather than critically interpreted in the current context.

Requegesis is a critical skill used when requirements are provided without further background (for example in public procurement requests) or when limited interaction between requestor and provider is possible and businesses struggle to respond with detailed analysis on effort, time and costs required to provide the goods or services.

Requegesis may be used when discussing how a functional specification can be traced to requirements and no clear lineage is available. In this case the verb can be altered to another portmanteau "requeguess" as in "we requeguessed URS-D-17 to include interfaces to CRM since that is what the customer uses today - but does not specify explicitly".  This means that the team took liberty to interpret requirements in context rather than taking them literally.

As of today, I have not been able to find any usage of this term online. I herewith declare 19th of November 2015 as the first public usage of the new word requegesis. Let’s see if this catches on.

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