How do you measure and evaluate the effectiveness and value of your requirements documents?

Use proper functional requirement, capture proper use cases , use non functional requirement , target relevant audience.Align business objectives and focucs on results.

One small suggestion here is to be sure to use a traceability matrix if you're going to use a different document for each type of requirement. Your reader must be able to know which User Requirement ties to which Business requirement, etc.

I often find user stories and requirements similar to the age old question of which came first- the chicken or the egg? Especially in situations where the purpose for and discovery audience are not clearly defined. Requirement deliverables seem to present themselves once these questions are answered.

In addition to following industry best practices, you can never go wrong with a Peer Review as a final step in holding yourself accountable for authoring a good requirements document.

I would also document number of dependencies on other systems, applications, teams, etc. Perhaps our delivery timelines weren't met because we are a UI/UX team and we had a dependency on a Mainframe team to implement changes in a coordinated effort with us but they couldn't prioritize the work as soon as we could.(Just an example).

Working sessions should always include your stakeholders, end users, testers, and engineering teams. Best to elicit feedback along the way than wait until a final review to find out you didn't capture what was intended.

In my experience useless meetings, while being fun and often working as a training/learning opportunity are what kill the effectiveness of building and maintaining a requirements document because of the costs. There are many requirements owners and a formal approval mechanism should be in place for the acceptance of every requirement. Those ways for approval identification are many and flexible enough to fit any organization. Selecting the one that fits your business and monitoring the effectiveness through defect removal of bad requirements helps discover weakness in process and understanding of business. It may be slow at first but lightening fast once you have established cause effect and remediation. This is another way to educate.

A testing process can surely tell you about the quality of the requirements, but I believe testing is mostly to confirm that the delivered thing meets those requirement.

Requirements documents should also contain problem statements and expected results. Too many I've seen are written based on what users think they need, but often these exact requirements in the end don't provide the true functionality needed.

One way I measure effectiveness of my requirement document when an individual not in my project understands the business need. Requirement document is effective when business team can read and sign off effectively, QA team member can design test scenarios easily and developer can estimate. More traceable a requirement document is , more it’s effective !