Software Engineering Institute

Traditionally, requirements are communicated through specifications. Yet stakeholders often have requirements that they are not aware of until their experiences with a product or service do not meet their expectations. Stakeholders cannot specify their unrealized requirements and might not specify their assumed requirements. Uncovering these unstated requirements can be challenging, and existing requirements methods do not address unstated needs except through approaches such as human-interface prototyping or simulation. Without gathering all requirements, both stated and unstated, stakeholder needs can go unrecognized until it is more costly to address them, and opportunities to innovate can be overlooked.

The Software Engineering Institute developed the KJ+ method to help organizations determine the unstated requirements of the varied stakeholders typical of today's large, diverse programs. The KJ+ method

• can be scaled to address the needs of multiple categories of stakeholders
• is usable by a diverse, non-collocated team of requirements analysts
• results in a more complete set of requirements as the basis for system design, implementation, deployment, operation, and sustainment

This brochure provides more information about the KJ+ method.