The Santa Approach to Requirements Gathering - part 2

Story continued from yesterday...

Systems

Now, as anyone knows, if you are going to develop new toys, it is very important that you understand which other toys the new toys will need to interact with. For example, if a kid has a Lego set, you cannot just buy Duplo’s and expect them to work together. The elves therefore must spend a bit of time peeping around to really understand what toys each kid still has and uses, which toys need upgraded with new features and which ones are legacy and need replaced. For the ones they know they must integrate with, they take some detailed notes around compatibility issues.

Functional Requirements

Once the elves have narrowed down the scope, determined who the kids are, how well they have behaved and what toys they must integrate with, they must take on the most important step. They must determine what the children actually want! The elves are pretty tricky about how they elicit these requirements. They rarely actually interview the children directly. Certainly they talk with the parents a little, but we all know that talking to “management” doesn’t necessarily get us to the right requirements. Sometimes they will do surveys via commercial-watching monitoring. However, the elves’ preferred method is to use passive observations of the children going about their daily lives. They hear the kids talking to friends about the latest toys, see the dreams at night of cool games and watch catches the kids’ eyes in toy stores. And to clear something up - when Santa visits the kids at the malls at Santa-fiscal-year-end, you might think he’s still requirements gathering – but that’s really the elves’ last chance to validate the lists of requirements they gathered.

Development through Release

Throughout the year, as the elves gather new requirements for the children in their regions, they immediately enter them into ReqPole, their requirements management tool of choice. That way the elf teams still up at the North Pole can start developing and testing toys very early in the year. This is the only way they could possibly get them all done in time for a December 25 release.

And so, when December 24 arrives, the sleigh is loaded and Santa heads out with his star reindeer to deliver the toys around the world. After the elves watch the sleigh launch, they immediately go nestle up in their beds to rest up for a solid day. Because they all know, on December 26, they start the cycle all over again.

And whether you like the Santa Approach to Requirements Gathering or not, you have to give it to them, they ALWAYS deliver on time!

The Santa Approach to Requirements Gathering

‘Twas the day after Christmas and all through the world, everyone was enjoying their Christmas surprises. Everyone except the North Pole’s favorite elves. These little elves had just helped deliver gifts to homes all over the world, but it was already time to start planning for next year’s surprises! And so the little elves begin their requirements gathering for next year’s holiday toys.

Scope
To kick-off next year’s project, the elves gather for a scoping meeting in the North Pole (except those that are based at the South Pole, they typically conference call in). Santa facilitates the effort to elicit the year’s gifting objectives. They debate the big scope decisions – do they think the kids will take a liking to electronic gifts (can they really top the Wii again so soon?) or maybe an outdoors focus (can they innovate a next generation of roller-blades?). This is a big decision to make because all the elfs’ requirements activities for the next year will focus around this decision. Once they have their scope defined, the elves set out to elicit requirements using a favorite approach of looking at the People, Systems and Data.

People
Once they have gifting objectives to define their scope, the elves have to divide up their work for the year. First, they draw the global org-chart in the snow. They find that it works best if teams of elves own regions of the world. For example, a team of about 30 elves could easily own the southwest part of the US. Within the regions, they break the org-chart down to cities, neighborhoods, houses, gender and finally into “good” or “needs improvement” children. This was all based on the prior year’s data of course, since we all know it’s really hard to keep an org-chart up to date. But once they get to work on their region, they can make updates to the chart pretty easily. And so, with their org charts completed, each elf team heads out to start their requirements analysis for the children in their chart.

Data
The elves find that after focusing on “who” they needed to build toys for, they need to look at the data involved in this project….the often-dreaded “Behavior Records”. We all know they are out there. We all know Santa knows what’s in them. And to the elves, they are the foundation of the requirements work. The elves have to quickly get to work to analyze the existing data records, interview SMEs to understand where they may be out of date, and update the records to guide their year. And of course, they have to create new records for any new children!

Tune in tomorrow to find out how the elves uses Systems, gather their functional requirements and hit their deadline!

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