Unverifiable Requirement

The Contractor shall consider the operational requirements described in the OCD to be a component of this FPS when conducting requirements analysis and design activities.

Comment - "shall consider" is a mental state – it cannot be verified. Something like "the Contractor shall provide an analysis to show…." is verifiable, as there is a physical trace.

Verification of requirements requires them to be in the form of "The contractor shall…" (Systems engineers are taught to ignore anything without a "shall"). The descriptions in the OCD are unlikely to be in this form, making them unsuitable for direct requirements verification. A requirement such as "The contractor shall provide an analysis to show how the scenarios described in the OCD will be satisfied by the design" would place the onus of demonstrating their consideration on the Contractor. The analysis would need to predate the design activities. The Contractor could well have considered the OCD, but after the design activities, or with different people. "When" only requires contemporaneity.

The statement, as it stands, leaves the option to the Contractor to consider the OCD, and then ignore what it describes, because its contents are not mandatory, and no analysis of "failure to meet" is requested. The statement also belongs under the Weak Statement heading. To import the OCD as verifiable requirements or approvable deviations requires much more effort

 

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