CAS-002 · Question #712
The sales staff at a software development company has received the following requirements from a customer: "We need the system to notify us in advance of all software errors and report all outages"…
The correct answer is C. The system shall email the administrator when processing deviates from expected conditions. Accurate requirements translation converts vague customer needs into precise, testable technical statements that developers can implement directly without ambiguity.
Question
The sales staff at a software development company has received the following requirements from a customer: "We need the system to notify us in advance of all software errors and report all outages". Which of the following BEST conveys these customer requirements to the software development team to understand and implement?
Options
- AThe system shall send a status message to a network monitoring console every five seconds
- BThe system shall alert the administrator upon the loss of network communications and when
- CThe system shall email the administrator when processing deviates from expected conditions
- DThe system shall email the administrator when an error condition is detected and a flag is
How the community answered
(42 responses)- A2% (1)
- B5% (2)
- C81% (34)
- D12% (5)
Why each option
Accurate requirements translation converts vague customer needs into precise, testable technical statements that developers can implement directly without ambiguity.
Sending a periodic status message every five seconds describes a heartbeat health-check pattern, not a condition-triggered alert for errors or outages as the customer requested.
Alerting only on loss of network communications is too narrow in scope and excludes the software errors and non-network outages that the customer explicitly requires notification for.
The customer requirement asks for advance notification of errors and reporting of outages. Option C specifies emailing the administrator when processing deviates from expected conditions, which captures proactive early-warning behavior before a full outage occurs and also covers error conditions at runtime. This phrasing maps directly to both customer needs and is specific enough for a development team to implement and verify.
Conditioning the alert on both an error detection and a separate flag being set adds an undocumented prerequisite not present in the original customer requirements, making the specification incomplete.
Concept tested: Translating business requirements into technical system specifications
Source: https://csrc.nist.gov/publications/detail/sp/800-160/vol-1/final
Topics
Community Discussion
No community discussion yet for this question.