Live from RE’08: The Towel Effect

The closing talk today was by Jean-Pascal van Ypersele from the Universite Catholique de Louvain-la-Neuve and Vice-chair of the IPCC working group 1. Say that 10 times out loud fast! Anyway, his talk was “Climage change: Challenges and Opportunities for Software Requirements Engineering”. In general, he discussed the background science behind the warming trends they have measured, and I by no means am going to try to recreate that here!

But I had a couple of interesting take-away thoughts. He discussed what we call the “towel effect”. I’m sure everyone has seen the signs in their hotel rooms suggesting to save resources by reusing your hotel towels. He suggested the results of a study on the effectiveness of such programs would be interesting. Partly because he thinks the presentation of the program is usually quite awful, most people probably do not participate, and even if they did, what kind of impact does it actually have? Dan Berry made a comment that he very much tried to do this in every hotel he stayed in, and yet not once did the cleaning staff save his old towel – they always gave him a new one anyway. Anyway, the speaker’s point was this is a marketing program by the hotel to look better, but proposes that they may not be terribly effective programs for actually helping the environment.

And the other more relevant take-away discussion is – what can we in RE do? Can we help come up with good solutions that solve the towel effect problem? But there really is an interesting large scale system problem here – there are many different stakeholders with variant priorities – how will we ever align them to do the right thing for the environment (whatever that “right” thing is!). You have companies who want to make money and reduce costs. You have individuals who want to recycle everything. You have governments who need to look at their global position on this, find money to fund projects, and of course they have to be elected. The point is there are a lot of different interests, so it’ll be interesting to see if we can come up with solutions that are accepted by all users.

For more related thoughts, see the green post: part 1 and part 2.

How Do You Make Requirements Processes Environmentally Green - Part 2

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 the world, for teams to meet to elicit requirements. In large companies, there is even quite a bit of site-to-site travel within the same city.

Remote Tools

In order to reduce our travel (local or long distance), we need better tools for working remotely with teams. Video conference can work, as long as it’s a reasonable cost and internet bandwidths are sufficient. The technology needs to be seamless (i.e. easy to use, no delays). There need to be whiteboard solutions that make it possible for remote teams to see the same work on the board as the people in the room.

Videos

There is a time difference issue when teams are globally distributed. Currently, teams often document requirements separately and email the thoughts back and forth. They might send documents to share or emails with questions and comments. One suggestion would be to use videos to capture each team’s ideas to share back and forth. The body language and tone would not be lost as it is in text. Obviously this has to be very easy to use technology, or text will win out. Ideally some sort of voice recognition would minimize having to speak and type the thoughts.

Team rooms

For the teams in the same room, having a team room environment can work well. For some period of time, people could sit in the same building and the same room and get a lot of work done together. This would include main stakeholders, subject matter experts, requirements analysts and even the development team. The company can avoid shifting permanent desks around by just temporarily locating them to this environment. They will have more opportunities to whiteboard solutions. They could keep lots of diagrams and other thought up on the walls without having to print them to look at. It would also minimize the need for video conferencing if they were to relocate for a period of time.

Today’s take-away thought:What are your current successes and issues with video conferencing solutions you have tried? Post your comments here.

It would seem that there are many opportunities that the requirements work we do could can be less environmentally impactful. However, I think much work has to be done on software and hardware tools for users to adopt such solutions.

How Do You Make Requirements Processes Environmentally Green - Part 1

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 curious about how we can reduce our impact on the environment when eliciting, documenting and reviewing requirements.

The two areas that jumped out at me were:

1. Reduce the amount of paper we use
2. Reduce the amount of travel we do, particularly on airplanes

Today’s post focuses on the paper reduction and my next post will cover the travel aspects.

Reduce Paper

The first suggestion for greener requirements processes is to reduce the use of paper. It has been my experience that people print more “stuff” for requirements activities than for most other parts of the software development process. My initial thought is that we print so much because we need to see things next to each other that do not fit nicely on a screen. For example, we like to quickly flip between pages of text, look at large diagrams of a system, and draw on documents. A document is inherently linear in its organization. If requirements relate to multiple sections of the document, it’s hard to switch between non-adjacent sections. And, for whatever reason, it’s easier to read some things on paper than on a screen. A few immediate solutions come to mind around software and hardware tools.

Requirements Tools

A well-designed requirements tool that is widely adopted in an organization (over using Word and Excel) would reduce a lot of the need to print requirements documents. Ideally, a requirements management tool would manage text requirements and associated diagrams and allow you to link objects at any level, quickly and intuitively. Unfortunately, the requirements tools offered to date are not solving this problem well.

Bigger Viewing Areas

I recently increased the size of the monitor on my home computer. It’s amazing how useful the increased size is for working on large volumes of information, simply because I can view more items at once. Potentially, we could use larger LCD monitors in our primary working spaces. This would require less flipping around within documents and reduce the urge to print everything out.

Portable solutions

I sometimes see people print documents to bring to meetings to read once or share with others. The first obvious solution to this problem is to ensure the people creating requirements have laptops. Secondly, we need projectors to easily share information with others. I’d like to see a projection option built into a laptop so we can avoid lugging projectors around. Imagine you could run to someone’s desk and just project onto their wall without any setup. A final suggestion here is to use tablet PCs. I have no personal experience with them but, if they allowed us to easily sketch diagrams, move things around on the screen quickly, and jot notes on existing documents, tablets could be easier to use than the current common solutions (and require less paper of course!).

Reusable resources

When there is no option other than hand-writing and drawing things, we should use whiteboards as much as possible (ideally scanning ones that can capture your work electronically). We could also use sticky flip-chart paper that is reusable like a whiteboard. Heck, maybe even use reusable whiteboard-style sticky notes!

Disclaimer: There are some obvious assumptions here around the technologies being more energy efficient than the resources used in paper waste.

Take-away question: Notice every time you print something in the next week. Why did you need to print it? Post your realizations here.