Requirements triage: what can we learn from a "medical" approach?

New-product development is commonly risky, judging by the number of high-profile failures that continue to occur-especially in software engineering. We can trace many of these failures back to requirements-related issues. Triage is a technique that the medical profession uses to prioritize treatment to patients on the basis of their symptoms' severity. Trauma triage provides some tantalizing insights into how we might measure risk of failure early, quickly, and accurately. For projects at significant risk, we could activate a "requirements trauma system" to include specialists, processes, and tools designed to correct the issues and improve the probability that the project ends successfully. We explain these techniques and suggest how we can adapt them to help identify and quantify requirements-related risks.