Overview of RQA

IBM Engineering Requirements Quality Assistant (RQA) is a software service that helps improve the clarity of requirements. The service uses IBM Watson® Natural Language Processing (NLP) to detect potential ambiguities and generates real-time scores to assess the quality of requirements.

Unclear or incomplete requirements are among the most common causes of project failure. If a project is poorly defined, its success is severely limited regardless of how much good work goes into its design, engineering, or production.

Writing formal, unambiguous, contractually binding statements is not easy. However, text-based requirements are powerful because they have an unlimited capacity to express new and complex ideas.

Clear, verifiable requirements are important for several reasons:

• For business managers, requirements determine how to allocate resources.
• For project managers, requirements define the scope of the project, which affects the schedule and budget.
• For systems engineers, requirements represent the transition from the business world to the engineering world.
• Requirements form the basis of a contract between suppliers, contractors, and other parties, and all parties must have the same understanding.