The NASA Ames Research Center in Moffett Field, nestled amongst the global headquarters of Google, LinkedIn, Yahoo and Symantec, is home to Carnegie Mellon Silicon Valley. At this campus, graduate students prepare to become the technical leaders of the Fortune 100 companies that surround them. Professor Cécile Péraire teaches courses out of the CMU ECE […]
Typically, Product companies share two business goals: Build the right product for their customers and get them to market quickly. I was honored to share the (virtual) stage with analyst Frank Gillett from Forrester Research to talk about some of the massive opportunities for connected devices to solve real-world problems. I mentioned being inspired by […]
And calculates the costs and losses caused by inferior RM “Forty to fifty percent.” That’s the percentage of companies that manage the creation, iteration, testing and launch of new products with MS Office, Google Docs and other all-purpose documentation tools, according to research from Gartner’s “Market Guide for Software Requirements Definition and Management Solutions.” The result? […]
As a System Engineer managing requirements do you ever feel like you’re playing a game of Topple? First, you start with a board that is relatively balanced, but depending on where you put the pieces it can quickly get off kilter. As the game evolves you are adding more and more pieces to the board. […]
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 […]
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