Ever get the impression that your stakeholders simply aren’t going to read the requirements documents you create? Better yet, have you ever had a stakeholder actually tell you directly that he or she just isn’t going to read the requirements? I haven’t, but I wish someone would. That sort of direct, honest communication would be [...]

One of the things I find interesting is the news pundits who ask the question “If a woman is elected president, what will her husband be called?” To me, the answer is completely obvious. If the wife of a president is a “First Lady,” then the husband of a president is the “First Gentleman”. Question [...]

I was in a meeting recently in which some great ideas were presented. The ideas would result in a number of improvements which would benefit the company and the users, and they were all pretty easy to implement. However, the ideas weren’t product features … they were changes to behavior. While I wholeheartedly agreed with [...]

On yesterday’s post, I covered how we can reduce the use of paper in requirements practices. Today I’m going to look at how we might reduce the travel as well. Reduce travel The second area for improvement is in reducing the necessity of travel. With the globalization of the industry, there is significant travel around [...]

Subtitle: It’s not easy being green The theme for IEEE’s RE08 conference is “Requirements engineering for a sustainable world”. The obvious topics that relate to this theme are about how we gather requirements for projects that are targeted at being “green”. However, I decided to look at the problem from a different viewpoint. I was [...]

In a previous post I discussed the value of conducting requirements audits. I’d like to give some (hopefully) practical experience on how to conduct audits. Define Standards/Guidelines If your organization doesn’t already have standards for what makes a good requirements artifact, then you need to start here first. This doesn’t have to be a big [...]

As requirements consultants we sometimes find ourselves working with people who have learned through painful experience that requirements are not fun. We like to think the process we use is actually pretty interesting and engaging but it is not uncommon for us to start a new project and find people who are dreading the thought [...]

Is there a “type” that is more suited to requirements elicitation and documentation? A survey of our experience identified four useful personality roles that have direct application to the requirements gathering process: Openers, Closers, Handlers, and Hunters. Jung at HeartPersonality typing rubrics seems to be a surprisingly touchy subject for a neutral “instrument” (the word [...]

Science fiction authors have had a huge impact on the development of science and technology. The flip-phone and PDA were inspired by Star Trek. Submarines were inspired by 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea. I thought the requirements space could use some similar visionary input (not that I’m on par with any of those sci-fi legends). [...]

For Agile development teams, there are three key modeling concepts that are critical for successful requirements modeling. First, create model artifacts “just in time” and make them “just good enough”. Creating model artifacts just in time means not trying to produce detailed models too far in advance of when they are needed or when the [...]