Stop chasing down documents in DOORS and focus on the items within them that matter. For many years, IBM’s Rational DOORS (v.9) has been a widely adopted Requirements Management (RM) tool for teams working with high-compliance systems engineering programs. Because it’s often sold into the enterprise as part of a larger IBM suite, its widespread […]
In the first part of this two-part series I described the value of managing risks formally on a software project and listed numerous common risks in various categories. This article describes the various activities associated with the practice of risk management and recommends specific information you should record about each risk you identify. Risk Management […]
The need for performing impact analysis is obvious for major enhancements. However, unexpected complications can work below the surface of even minor change requests. A consulting client of mine once had to change the text of a single error message in its product. What could be simpler? The product was available in both English and […]
This article continues the exploration of requirements-related metrics that I began in Measuring Requirements: Product Size and Requirements Quality. Requirements Status Track the status of each requirement over time to monitor overall project status, perhaps defining a requirement attribute to store this information. Status tracking can help you avoid the pervasive “ninety percent done” problem of software project […]
Disciplined software organizations collect a focused set of metrics about each of their projects. These metrics provide insight into the size of the product; the effort, time, and money that the project or individual tasks consumed; the project status; and the product’s quality. Because requirements are an essential project component, you should measure several aspects […]
This article continues the exploration of requirements-related metrics that I began in Part 1, which looked at measuring product size and requirements quality. Requirements Status Track the status of each requirement over time to monitor overall project status, perhaps defining a requirement attribute to store this information. Status tracking can help you avoid the pervasive […]
Disciplined software organizations collect a focused set of metrics about each of their projects. These metrics provide insight into the size of the product; the effort, time, and money that the project or individual tasks consumed; the project status; and the product’s quality. Because requirements are an essential project component, you should measure several aspects […]
High-performance projects have effective processes for all of the requirements engineering components: elicitation, analysis, specification, validation, and management. To facilitate the performance of these processes, every organization needs a collection of appropriate process assets. A process encompasses the actions you take and the deliverables you produce; process assets help the team members perform those processes […]
You might have noticed that requirements activities on projects sometimes lead to adversarial relationships. Customers don’t always feel that business analysts have their best interests at heart. Product managers get frustrated when customers demand never-ending changes in requirements but don’t want the delivery date to slip. Testers don’t appreciate having to redo their work because […]
Ambiguity is one of the biggest problems I see with requirements specifications written (as they all are) in natural language. There is no end to ways that people can miscommunicate through the written word. The business analyst’s goal is to try to make the meaning of each requirement as precise and clear as possible, aiming […]
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