Before a project enters the development phase, the requirements are transferred from the client to the software development team. This process is usually divided into the following steps:

1. Requirements Analysis
The basic aim of the analysis is to understand the problem domain.  The more the communication in this phase, the better it is for an effective solution to be proposed. Often analysis model diagrams are used for better understanding.

2. Requirements Specifications
In this phase, the requirements of the client are documented in the form of a Requirement Specification Document

3. Requirement Validation
In this phase, the Requirement Specification Document is validated by the client.

For the process to be effective, there has to be continuous feedback from both sides in the above 3 steps. 

The quality of these 3 phases decides the effective scheduling of the project and the actual cost. For most projects, the cost of removing the errors increases exponentially as the project proceeds. 

Generally, the following rule applies:

As we can see, there is an exponential increase in the cost of removing the errors as the project proceeds. Hence, if we spend enough effort in analyzing the project requirements before starting the development, the quality of the software can be increased while exponentially reducing the costs associated with software development and testing.

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