One of the values that we bring is that we can help our clients to decide what scope to cut by providing them with a framework that links quantifiable business objectives to specific features. We create an objective chain to do this and it helps to spotlight features that don’t feed into the core business [...]

The Data Flow Diagram (DFD) is a very useful part of the Requirements Modeling Language (RML™). The Structured Analysis Wiki contains a great explanation of how to create a DFD, so I’m not going to cover that information here. Instead, I’m going to provide one answer to the question “How do I know when to [...]

I was recently working with a cusotmer on a project using an agile methodology. The organization was moving towards trying to do most of their projects in agile, so the nature of this is that they have a lot of non-agile pieces to their methodology still in place. We were cruising along in defining requirements [...]

I got a lousy haircut the other day. I’m not happy. And, one of the things I’m least happy with is the fact that I can trace one comment I made to what ended up happening. I still hold the hair stylist responsible, because she’s the expert. I left something unspoken related to the comment, [...]

Tim Storer from St. Andrews University in Scotland presented this paper. His underlying assumption is that in large scale socio-technical enterprise systems, you are constrained by the design of the platform you select, integration to other systems, and systems of systems factors. He contends that the functional requirements in these projects are more useful in [...]

The opening keynote for CAiSE’09 was Nigel Shadbolt from the Web Science Research Institute. This organization was started in 2006 to try to understand the science of the web and anticipate future developments and threats. It most certainly was a real pleasure to hear Nigel speak. More than proposing answers, he proposed the types of [...]

This is just a reminder that the REET09 workshop, held in conjunction with IEEE’s Requirements Engineering 09 conference, is in Atlanta this year on August 31! I’d like to encourage all of you to submit papers or training activities related to educating people on requirements! If you don’t feel like you have enough to do [...]

Today we have an example to illustrate what I’ve said in the past two posts from Tuesday’s setup for the ROM and Wednesday’s definition of the ROM. Let’s say in this scenario we have an online gaming company that historically has only built complex role-playing games. Now let’s say the head of product management wants [...]

What follows is our ROM defined. For context, you can see yesterday’s post on why we have a ROM now at Seilevel. Definitions for the items in the ROM hierarchy: Business Problem: Describes a problem to be solved. Business Objectives: Desired metrics the business seeks to meet in order to solve the problem. Business Strategy: [...]

What follows is a summary of the paper I wrote with James Hulgan (also from Seilevel) and presented at REFSQ’09 last week. The paper is titled “Experiences with a Requirements Object Model”. You can get the actual paper here. Most software projects we’ve seen develop features that don’t add value or they don’t build what [...]