3 Basic Tips to Data Migration Requirements for your Software Project

It's late stage of a project, so it's time to start worrying about your data migration requirements if you haven't already! If you have done it, good for you! You can just stop reading.


But so many projects push this to the end and then panic when it doesn't go well. I have seen project after project have late deployments because the data was not properly migrated and tested. Here are a few tips to consider:

1. User your data models to identify what data should be migrated. For example, you can use the boxes in Business Data Diagrams (BDDs) and you can use the data stores in Data Flow Diagrams (DFDs).
2. You can actually do a two-way check here - if you get data dumps and have fields that are not in your data models, then you may be missing a requirement.
3. Plan for a lot of time to test this. Surely someone will test the migration scripts themselves and someone is likely testing your code, but you also want to plan for testing the integration of the migrated data to the code. So often properities are not setup correctly and so the data doesn't show up in your software, even thoug it's in the database behind the scenes.

Getting Ramped Up

Luckily I have been working fairly consistently with the same client lately. This means that I haven’t had to constantly jot down notes during meetings on things to look up afterward, find corporate maps so I don’t get lost in symmetrical buildings with no windows, or remember not to call the client by the previous engagement’s name.


I was asked recently how I plan on dealing with being dropped into a new environment with a different client. Well, if there were no deadlines and nothing to get done, I would just read documentation all day. Even that would only go so far though. I have no expectations that existing documentation is comprehensive or understandable. It will most likely be the case that you will be creating documentation that others will use when trying to grasp the environment.


So in this world of yesterday deadlines we have to learn things on the go. This means that when I land, I have to get my hands on a systems context diagram so that I can understand what talks to what. From there I can ask who the SMEs are for the different systems and piece together what the systems are for and what they actually do in implementation. This should be the biggest chunk of ramp time, figuring out what systems do so you can understand why you are doing something to change them.


The other obstacles to starting with a new client are regulations and business practices. You will never be able to know all of them. Because it takes multiple subject matter experts to own these, your best course of action is to familiarize yourself enough so that you can flag potential areas for the SMEs to fill in. As much as possible, try to incorporate these rules into your diagrams.


The key is that you never want to be reading up on things for the sake of reading up on them. You always want to be actively producing a deliverable. So reading the interface documentation for the sales system should be helping you gather the first set of gap requirements.

The Other 8 Groups in the Software Requirements Audience

Do you know who your audience is for your software requirements? Why, it’s the development organization, of course! And while that is true, development is the main audience for software requirements, there are many other audience members as well.

1. Testing Team. I am sure that most of you also thought of the testing team as another audience for software requirements. The software requirements give the test team a baseline from which to write their test plan, test cases and test scripts. The test team looks not only to see if the software works, but does it work the way the user wants it to work, according to the software requirements. You may also find that your test team is an excellent group to review your software requirements for clarity. They tend to look at software requirements from a perspective of “how would I test that requirement?” If they cannot think of a way to test the software requirement, the software requirement may not be clear and/or concise.

2. End Users. What about the end user? Those who are communicating what their needs are, of which the software requirements are intended to capture? They are also an audience for your software requirements. We need their reviews to make sure we have documented their needs clearly and accurately.

3. Technical Writing. Technical writing is another group that relies on software requirements for their work. We all hope that the Help content of the product reflects what the software does, the best place for the technical writing team to get that information starts with the software requirements. Of course they will also confirm their content with the software itself, but they can certainly get started with the software requirements.

4. Translation Teams. Translation teams also rely on software requirements to help them understand what the product is supposed to do, so they can translate not only the software but also the technical documentation appropriately for their language and culture.

5. Training. Organizations that develop training courses for the software also rely on the software requirements. Like many groups, the software requirements help the training department plan and structure their curriculum, so they can develop and deliver courses quickly and that are ready for training the end users when the software is implemented.

6. Support Organizations. Support organizations, both internal help desks and product support groups that take the front line calls from customers also use the software requirements to help trouble shoot issues reported. By looking at the software requirements, Support can help determine if the issue reported is a flaw in the software, or if it is working as intended.

7. IT. Internal IT groups are also interested in software requirements. Beyond the technical requirements for hardware, software, etc that will be required to support the software, IT groups also want to understand any interfaces to other existing software that must be built. They need to understand the support requirements of the software, what sort of administrative tasks will be required of them.

8. Consulting. If you are working in a commercial software environment, your consulting organization would also be an audience for your software requirements. They need to understand the new software that is soon to be released, so they can plan implementation or migration services for your customers.

There are lots of audiences, make sure you are including them all when you design the format/layout and include them in all the appropriate review meetings.

An Actual Case of Software Requirements Re-use

We have been using Caliber for a few years and we recently decided to research whether there was a requirements management tool that more cleanly supported working offline. I actually wrote a bit about our vendor selection process and our search for a requirements tool awhile back, so if you read it, you’ll know we did this project working from software requirements written at the level necessary to do a vendor selection. Well, here we are again a few years later, with a pretty important feature request that we didn’t recognize the priority of when we did the first analysis. The issue is that we often work on cellular cards, which with Caliber has doesn’t work well – the connection is too slow. So we really need to be able to just work offline and sync. We have a few anecdotes about other vendor tools in the market and how they handle offline support. We even have thoughts of building some offline tool ourselves to sync with Caliber or another backend. In the end, we are trying to follow our vendor selection process. We have done a bit of research on the other tools we know might work – including reading feedback and doing a mini demo ourselves. And at the same time, we have our existing software requirements from the first time we selected a tool that we are reviewing.




Our intent is to review any tools we consider against those original requirements. Ideally we really need reprioritize those as our needs may have changed, but for the most part we can select a new tool with MUCH less work than the first time. My estimate is it’ll take a tenth of the time this round through.




The only downsides to this, our old requirements aren’t in a tool (since we didn’t have a tool when we did the first analysis) and I don’t know how easily we can get them in one. But the bigger issue is there is no organization to them at all – they are about 150 features, not organized by any other useful models (and that’s because we didn’t use models as consistently then!). So, while we do have our software requirements to reuse, we probably could do a pass on improving them too. But even at that, it’s still so much less time committed.

Software Requirements Specification Template

We’ve just updated our suggested business requirements document template, though it can be used as a template for any type of requirements specification. You can find it here on our Resources page. One thing we strongly suggest is that you create and update requirements within a requirements management tool and then output as needed to a document such as this. We use Borland Caliber and have found that it is relatively easy to export from Caliber into this format. This is a great way to deliver your requirements to the team, but if you can avoid it, do not use the Word document as your source as you will likely step on each other eventually and it makes traceability very hard!

6 Basic Techniques for Successful Software Requirements Elicitation with Remote International Customers

In this global environment, there is rarely a project we work on that doesn’t have some set of customer users in a remote location, inevitably overseas. While we are typically eliciting requirements in English, we are always faced with ESL customers. So here are a few tips I shared with my team this week as we prepped for such a session with users in China.

1. Communicate their value. Help them understand how important they are to the success of your project. After all, you couldn't possibly understand their business needs as well as they do – with differences in business practices, culture, and preferences.
2. Talk slow. This should be obvious, but it always happens that we talk much too fast, so slow it down. Be very thankful they are willing to talk back to you in English! So whatever you need to do to remind yourself frequently through the discussion to talk slow, do it. Ideas I have include a post-it on the corner of your screen or a co-worker sitting beside you to remind you frequently.
3. Eyes in the room. Have someone in the room, if at all possible, to facilitate the discussion. If you cannot hear or clearly understand a comment (this often happens with large rooms of people and a speaker phone), that person can sit beside the phone and repeat it. Have a communication tool such as Instant Messenger open on a computer that isn’t projecting, so that person can communicate with you about body language – to tell you if you are going too fast or if people in the room look lost.
4. Visual is important. I like to prepare powerpoint slides with small bits of information on each slide pertaining to what we are talking about. So perhaps a screen shot or mock-up with a few features list on a slide. Diagrams and visual models are also extremely helpful.
5. Send materials ahead. As important as visual materials are, they are ten times more useful if you send them ahead. I know I have a better time reading foreign languages than I do hearing them, and this is the case for most. So if you send the materials ahead, they will have a chance to read them and more likely follow along with you during the discussion.
6. Open questions, not closed. Depending on the culture, some people are hesitant to ask questions or tell you something negative. So be sure to ask open ended questions. Instead of “are there any questions?” you would ask “what questions do you have?” – because we know they have some. Then call on people by name to ask what questions they have. Ask their leader what questions he/she has. If they say they are ok with you are presenting for requirements, then you really should ask “What are you concerned about?” or “What have we not captured that you need to have?” or “What are you not ok with” instead of “Is this ok?”.

4 Tips to Not Destroy Your Project if you Must Use Spreadsheets for Software Requirements

A year ago, I was working on a project where we created a list of features in Excel to help development understand at a high-level what would be in the new system we were building so that they could provide quick and dirty estimates. Out of these estimates, a solution design for the project was chosen and the team headed down the path of a full blown software development lifecycle on these features. Before too long, we recognized the nightmare that Excel was going to cause us, so we uploaded the features from Excel into Borland’s Caliber requirements management tool. The great thing was we could continue to export to Excel pretty quickly for delivery to our customer, since they didn’t have the tool and they were used to that format.

Now also of note, the team decided to use something a bit like SCRUM for this project, so we just treated the features list as a “backlog” of sorts. As sets of features were prioritized for an upcoming sprint, the business analysis team did its elicitation and documented requirements in the form of models from RML™. Throughout this process, we wrote user stories instead of formal use cases, used other visual models as appropriate, and instead of traditional “shall statements”, we wrote “confirmation statements” to describe the functional requirements and business rules. They were used to describe in detail what the system actually needed to do. Oh and by the way, these were all put in Caliber and exported into Word docs as needed for review and development.

Let’s jump ahead 6 months. Our team actually wasn’t on this project for about 3 months, and when we came back to it, we found what I would label “a requirements mess”. I have analyzed this a million times to understand what happened when we transitioned off for that time period that it went so wrong to land the team in this situation. And while I have ideas, the point of this post really is that it just was a mess.

Unfortunately the team stopped using Caliber completely, so all requirements changes and new additions were done in Excel and Word. As is expected, they had lost chunks of work in overwriting newer versions with older versions by accident. There used to be traceability between features and detailed system requirements, but that was completely lost.

What was most alarming and damaging was that the development team believed that the Excel list (which represents just a list of features with one-line sentence descriptions) was the full set of requirements. They weren’t even looking at the user stories, models, and confirmation statements to develop the system! As one might expect, the system developed didn’t really meet the requirements.

And so we headed down a path of narrowing the gap between what was developed and what was required, as well as completing analysis on areas not yet developed.

Over the next few months it became completely apparent how much people love to use Excel. I mean LOVE. Sure enough, one year later, the Excel file still lives as the source of what the scope is on this project. And while they are now using the detailed requirements documents to develop, the Excel list is still the master of all information. And did I mention, there are now about 60 columns to it? And 3 versions of the document that have different information in different columns? I had the exciting task of trying to merge the 3 back into 1, but while I was doing that, someone was editing one of those versions so now we still have 2 versions. Alas we are trying to get approval to get a few licenses of Caliber in place so we can move this spreadsheet back into a management tool.

But the moral of the story is….well Excel sucks for managing requirements, but if you must absolutely use it:

1. Do more than just use Excel – put your requirements details in other formats as well.

2. Be cautious about what information belongs it and what does not.

3. Be careful what you communicate that it actually represents to the project team.

4. And please use a tool behind that Excel to house your data.

Managing the Software Requirements Process for “Green Screen” Replacement Applications – Part 1

I have been on teams that created requirements for replacing old “Green Screen” mainframe applications and have also observed the work of my colleagues on similar projects. The observations here are based on our experiences with these efforts and offer suggestions to anyone who is about to embark on a similar project.

This post is split into two parts. Part 1 identifies issues that make these projects challenging and different from other requirements projects. Part 2 offers specific suggestions on how to tackle these projects and describes practices that will result in a greater likelihood of success.

What makes Green Screen replacement projects so challenging?

It is not a lack of proper tools or models that make these requirements difficult to capture and define. The complexities are rooted in the following:
a. Existing organizational processes
b. Resistance to change due to fear and uncertainty
c. Disruption to current operations
d. Potential job losses
e. Lack of clear understanding of the impact on indirect users of the existing system
f. Poor vendor communications to the rank and file users of the new system
g. Lack of proper management communications on the value of the proposed change
The combination of these factors makes the act of eliciting good requirements difficult and extremely challenging. Each of these areas is discussed in greater detail below.


Existing Organizational Processes
Green Screen applications are typically twenty or thirty years old, though it is not unusual to find applications that have been in use for longer periods of time. Over this time, extremely elaborate organizational processes will have been created, evolved, perfected and institutionalized in the company. Changing these longstanding processes to support a new application can be extremely difficult. While it can be argued that any kind of application change is likely to confront process change, four things made Green Screen processes unique.

a. Longstanding
The processes built around Green Screen applications will be as old as the applications themselves. Change is inherently difficult. Changing something that has been around for a quarter century or more is infinitely more difficult.


b. Stable
For the most part, these processes will have undergone little substantive change for many years. Most recent changes would have been tweaking to make something more efficient, plug a few holes, fix weaknesses in the existing workflow or in response to some minor changes in the business environment. These processes are not perfect but they keep the show going day in and day out.


c. Fully Integrated with the Application
The existing processes and the application will have a seamless linkage. No matter how convoluted and byzantine the processes might be, they are totally synchronized with the application. Over time, the organization will have developed detailed processes that reinforce the strengths of the application and compensate for the weaknesses. In a perverse way, changing these processes is tinkering with perfection or something that looks awfully close to it when it comes to marrying an application with supporting processes.


d. Fully Understood
The combination of longevity, stability and application integration make the processes extremely well understood within the company. For the most part, all the different departments and individuals within these departments know what they need to do, when they need to do it and how to do it. Replacing all this with new processes that no one fully understands is an extremely challenging proposition.


Resistance to Change Due To Fear and Uncertainty
This a common characteristic of many projects that seek to introduce a new application or a new way of doing things. In the case of Green Screen applications, this natural resistance is hardened for the following reasons.

a. Fear of Failure on a Massive Scale
Green Screen applications are usually “mission critical.” They typically are extremely important to the day to day running of the business. Any failure during the switchover will have an immediate and tangible financial impact on the business that will be reflected in quarterly earnings. Depending on the reach of the application, the impact could be companywide with potentially disastrous consequences. This reality adds an extra edge to the element of fear associated with the change.


b. Uncertainty Due to a Major Systemic Change
Almost all Green Screen applications involve changes in multiple departments or functional areas of the company. It is not uncommon for the entire operations of a company to be impacted by a Green Screen change. Whenever multiple departments are involved, the element of uncertainty associated with the change gets ratcheted up. These efforts are almost always accompanied by an enormous amount of chatter, rumors and conflicting statements about who is doing or not doing something. Every day will bring a new dynamic because some department or the other is unhappy, not going to support the rollout fully or flat out not going to make a change. This leads to an enormous amount of confusion that brings with it a great amount of uncertainty.


c. Let the Other Guy Go First
In such an environment where fear and uncertainty are pervasive, the smart play is to do nothing and wait for the next guy, department or functional group to make the first move. So, you will meet with a lot of covert and passive resistance to change that needs to be managed.


d. Incomplete Plans
The sheer complexity and scope of Green Screen change efforts makes thorough planning of the changeover practically impossible. It is not possible to have fully fleshed out responses to all the legitimate concerns that users will have around the change. This gives the impression of an effort that is not carefully thought through. It is natural for users to focus on the unknowns and areas of weakness in the planning and extrapolate that to the entire effort. These perceptions feed into the underlying fear and add to the uncertainty barrier to be overcome.


Disruption to Current Operations
Most Green Screen systems are transactional systems on which the daily business of the company is conducted. When the switch over takes place there will be a transition period during which some amount of productivity will be lost as people get used to the new system. This is true even for successful implementations. It takes the users a few weeks to a couple of quarters to truly understand the new features and appreciate the benefits. This perceived (and real) loss of productivity even in a best case scenario causes users to instinctively resist or at the very least postpone the day of reckoning by throwing up roadblocks to the entire process starting with requirements. This resistance to the requirements effort is manifested in the following ways.

a. Why is My Department Being Penalized?
This complaint will almost certainly come from departments that perform data entry. In a vast majority of situations, Green Screen data entry is faster than mouse driven data entry that it is usually replaced with. This will lead to a drop in productivity in the short run for the department performing data entry. But it is not a zero sum game. These increases in time to perform some tasks are almost always offset by significant benefits in other areas of the application like the ability to cross sell or up sell customers. But it usually takes some time for these benefits to be realized. The increases in time and resultant productivity losses however are felt immediately. It is these short term losses that functional area managers will focus on. These arguments will be framed as having their departments victimized so that other departments can do their jobs better.

b. My Numbers Will Look Bad
Organizations that have extensive productivity measurement systems in place that track time very closely will react very strongly to anything that causes a short term hit in productivity or the time it takes to perform certain tasks. This is a very real problem that the requirements engineer will face. There will be outright hostility and lack of cooperation as a result of this that needs to be managed and eventually overcome if any progress is to be made.


Potential Job Losses
The anticipation of the loss of jobs causes both direct and indirect opposition to the requirements efforts of the replacement application. There are two main areas where jobs typically become redundant when Green Screen systems are replaced.

a. Data Entry Operators
Green Screen systems typically have highly specialized data entry personnel. The lack of graphical interfaces results in reliance on arcane Function Key combinations to perform simple and complex data entry tasks. Most companies have teams of employees who have mastered these tasks and are a valuable part of the daily operations. When the new application is introduced many, if not all of these employees will no longer needed by the company and are likely to be let go.
These employees are often treated as expendable by their companies but they are a treasure trove of information for a requirements engineer. They understand the underlying application better than anyone else in the organization. Simply put, they can tell you what the application actually does as opposed to what someone thinks it does or should be doing. This information is critical since Green Screen applications typically have very poor or no documentation of their functionality.
They know who they perform data entry for in addition to the obvious users. These are the hidden users of the system who need to be accounted for and are often overlooked with potentially dangerous consequences down the road.
Last and most importantly, they can tell you “why” some things are done. This is critically important to understand what exactly a system does and needs to be replicated by the replacement. Simply playing with an application and going through it from end to end is not sufficient to understand what the system is doing. This is especially true if you are not familiar with the intricacies of the application.
In a nutshell, these users are very critical to understanding what the existing system does, why it does certain things and who are the users of the system. But faced with the prospect of almost certainly losing their jobs if the new effort is successful, they have no incentive to cooperate. Not having the information in their heads can have very serious consequences for the requirements created to support the changeover.


b. Employees Involved in Manual Processing of Information
A generalization of Green Screen systems is that they are excellent at transaction processing but very poor at data analysis. Over the years organizations have addressed this gap by developing complex data analysis solutions based on third party applictions. But even with these extensive investments, there are always gaps in the data needed to make routine business decisions. These gaps are invariably filled with data extracts to spreadsheets that are analyzed by specialists. The data aggregation into spreadsheets is done by employees who perform time consuming tasks to import data from multiple sources into a single spreadsheet that is then forwarded on the specialist for interpretation and decision making.
This aggregation and analysis of data outside the main system are usually referred to as “manual” processes by most companies. These processes are extremely difficult to understand or infer from a walkthrough of the application. Even assuming that we can guess at a missing process, without an in depth knowledge of all the systems, it is extremely difficult to know where the data to make the analysis comes from, how it is aggregated and cleaned up before being provided for analysis and decision making.
This information is in the heads of users who perform these tasks. Here again, the reality that they could all be out of a job if the replacement effort is successful leads to resistance and lack of cooperation with the requirements effort.


Not Understanding the Impact on All Users
The universe of users impacted by a system change is not limited to users who directly interact with the system. This is true of all systems and a common mistake made in many requirements efforts. However, the sheer scale and scope of most Green Screen replacements compounds this problem.

For example, an application that replaces a Green Screen Order Entry system impacts far more than just the Sales Team who are the direct users of the application. Accounting, Finance, Customer Service, Post Order Processing, Marketing and Product Management will all be impacted either directly or indirectly by the change. Each of these departments interacts with the system in one of four ways:
a. Directly – Customer Service is likely to use the system to enter Orders to process returns and repairs.
b. Data Providers – Product Management will provide data that is used by the Order Entry system.
c. Data Consumers – Post Order Processing will use data created by the Order Entry system for their operations.
d. Data Providers AND Consumers – Accounting, Marketing and Finance will typically provide data and inputs that are used by the system and also consume data generated by the system.

Not knowing who all the impacted users are and how they interface with the system is a critical mistake that can potentially torpedo a requirements effort.


Poor Vendor Communications
While some organizations do develop new applications from the ground up to replace Green Screen applications, most companies use off the shelf software that is customized for the specific needs of their business. I have yet to see one instance where the features and benefits of the new software have been clearly communicated to the user community.

The vendors are very heavily engaged with senior management and a select group of users during the sales process. Once the sale is made, the technical staff come in and start the process of implementing the solution. I have not seen a coherent strategy in place from any vendor to actively evangelize their product and its benefits to users AFTER the sale is made and BEFORE the software goes live. This leaves a huge vacuum of knowledge and expectations in the user community. It is in this vacuum that fear and uncertainty take root and blossom into full blown chaos.

Specifically, these are the key areas of deficiency that lead to problems.

a. The Built in Processes Supported by the Product and Recommended by the Vendor
All vendors of enterprise class software claim to have “best practices and processes” built into their software. But I am yet to see any kind of documentation, presentation, training or coherent communications that explain clearly and simply to users what these processes are and how they should be adopted. If there are such materials and resources available, then they sure fooled me with totally inscrutable presentations that were so stealthy that I missed them altogether!

As requirements professionals we are constantly questioned by users as to what these processes and practices are. The fact that we have to confess total ignorance hurts us in two ways. First, it hurts our credibility with users who are bemused that we do not seem to know anything about the system we are de-facto representatives of. Second, users are reluctant to spend a lot of time defining processes and procedures that may all be overridden by processes that are to be adopted with the new software implementation.


b. The Features and Benefits of the New System
The situation faced with lack of information about the processes to be adopted with the new system are true of the features as well. Most of the time users are given a dog and pony show where someone does a quick fly through of the application. These are at a very high level and of little use to the user community who have much more specific questions in mind that are not answered. I have seen two things happen and both are bad.

First, users assume that the software has certain capabilities and features that it may or may not have. These assumptions are seldom articulated until we are well past requirements gathering and moving towards implementation. This makes for a whole bunch of nasty surprises.
Second, users lose the forest for the trees. I have seen quite a few demonstrations that very quickly get into the weeds on some arcane point a strident user or user group make. Before you know it, the demonstration has degenerated into an agonizing exercise in specificity that only one or a small handful of users and the demonstrator care about. Most importantly, huge chunks of precious demonstration time are lost and the remaining time makes the rest of the demonstration a waste of everyone’s time since they are rushed and general in the extreme.

c. The Inevitability Fallacy
Vendors assume that since the sale is made, it is inevitable that the system will get implemented and adopted by the user community. This belief guides their interactions with the user community. Unfortunately, most vendors do not realize that just because someone signed a contract to purchase the software, there is no guarantee that the rest of the organization will simply go along with the decision. They usually come to this frightening realization many months into the implementation effort when they do not seem to be getting the traction they thought they would be getting. The requirements effort is a good predictor of potential issues down the road. General rule of thumb – if the requirements team is competent and unable to generate good requirements, it usually means that the users are not buying whatever it is the vendors are trying to sell them.


Lack of Proper Management Communications to Users on the Value of the Proposed Change
There is a lack of clear, concise communications from Management and Project Sponsors on what the business value of the proposed change is, how the business value is to be realized as a result of the change, over what time frame the value will be realized, how it will impact the business in the short and long run and who will be impacted by the change.

What I have seen in practice are conflicting statements of value (both real and imaginary), extremely general statements of benefits (we need to come into the 21st century), vague notions around the reason for the change (it is about time we did something different around here), extremely aggressive and unrealistic timelines (we will go live in 3 months where 12 months is more reasonable) and little to no information at all on the things that the users care about the most – how will this affect me, my job, my department and my coworkers.

Presented with this vacuum, users fill in the blanks with their own combination of fear, rumors, disbelief, derision and a combination of outright and latent hostility. For a requirements engineer, this translates into many hours and days of wasted effort in getting people to meetings they do not want to attend, and when they do get there, trying to answer fundamental questions about the project – why, how much, when, so what – BEFORE you can even begin to elicit one useful requirement out of the group. I have often found myself in the uncomfortable position of not knowing the answers to their questions or, worse yet, knowing the answers and wondering if I should be the one giving it to the users.

Great, Now What?
As you read this, you might feel like you are in an echo chamber. Anyone who has practiced our craft long enough is very familiar with everything I have commented on here. It has gotten to the point where we are resigned to dealing with these kinds of situations and just “accepting” it as the reality we are confronted with.

But it need not and should not be this way. Change is inherent in every business endeavor. We just need to do a better job of managing it. There are ways in which we can manage the process of change with common sense, honest and open communication and dignity. This does not mean that the end result will be satisfactory for all or that there will be no pain involved. The people we work with are far smarter than we give them credit for. They may not like change but are more likely to help everyone get there if we all know what we are striving for.

In my next post on this topic, I will discuss specific steps that can be taken to overcome the hurdles identified in this post and answer the question I posited “Great, Now What?”

A Very Nice Software Requirements Blog – Please Pay Them a Visit

As someone who is part of the family of requirements professionals, it is always exciting to find a new source of writings on the subject that is near and dear to our heart. I recently discovered the Blueprint Software blog that can be found here.

It is clear from reading the posts on their site that they care passionately about the subject matter. The articles are well written, informative and useful to both practitioners of our craft and consumers of our “dog food” :-). If you are into macabre humor, check out the post on the resetting “smart bomb”. So long as you are not at business end of one of these contraptions, it is really funny and drives home the point (literally) of good, clean, and above all, complete software requirements!

Last but not the least, if you have never seen the classic Dilbert cartoon on software requirements, they have a copy there. That alone is worth the price of admission, in this case your time and interest. Here is wishing them luck and hope they keep churning out great posts. At the end of the day, we are all better off with more great content. Enjoy.

Using a Group to Prioritize Software Requirements for Complex Multifunctional Projects

Prioritizing and identifying requirements that get developed in a release cycle can be a tricky proposition. It is one of the most important things we do as Product Managers. It is also one of the most challenging.

Most organizations use some means of categorizing requirements. Two common examples I have seen: Must Have, Important, Nice to Have. High, Medium, Low. There are far better ways of prioritizing requirements but the purpose of this post is to deal with another level of complexity altogether. How do we decide which functional unit or Department's features gets built when dealing with a large scale development project that spans multiple groups / functional areas within a company?

I worked on a very large and complex implementation of a factory system software where we had to confront and overcome this very problem. The software that was being developed would essentially control all the manufacturing activities of the factory. As such, the application had functionality for all the different aspects of manufacturing - product movement between different processing machines, product storage in the factory, maintenance of equipment, sampling of output, manufacturing processes, manufacturing instructions for each step in the process and so on.

There were well established Departments that handled each of these different aspects of the manufacturing process. For example, there were Departments for Maintenance, Quality Control, Materials, Inventory, Production and so on. Each Department had their own specific set of requirements - functionality they needed out of the application to enable them to perform their specific and specialized tasks.

When deciding which features to develop for a given release, we encountered the following problems:

1. A prioritized list of features (across all Departments) was not very useful since we ended up with too many critical features that made prioritization for a release extremely difficult and in many cases meaningless.
2. Critical dependencies that existed between Departments were missed. For example, developing some sampling functionality was quite useless unless certain manufacturing instructions and material movement capabilities were already in place.
3. The sum of individual parts did not quite add up to a desired total of functionality. This was largely because critical dependencies between Departments were missed.
4. Individual Departments graded the success or failure of development efforts based on the "quantity" of features they got in a release and not how the overall manufacturing process as a whole fared.
5. The political wrangling, infighting and shenanigans got totally out of control as each Department tried to get more features into each release, regardless of whether it made sense to the overall operations or not.
6. The overall development process was perceived by all the users as political, arbitrary and lacking in transparency.

We solved the problem by using a Group methodology to decide the features that got included in a release. The way the teams were constituted and the manner in which they functioned are detailed below.

The Team

1. Every Department for whom functionality was being developed was included in the Core Team.
2. Each Department was requested to provide three members to participate in the Core Team - One Manager and two additional technical members who represented the Department. These members were authorized to vote for and speak on behalf of their Departments. These individuals were collectively referred to as the Core Team.
3. Attendance at the Core Team meetings was not restricted to the Core Team members. Any number of attendees from each Department were permitted to attend. The only restrictions were as follows:
A. Only the Core Team members were allowed to speak on behalf of their respective Departments.
B. Any amount of consultation was permitted within the Department representatives and attendees so long as they did not disrupt proceedings.
4. Senior Managers, Vice Presidents and other senior executives were explicitly excluded from the Core Team. The output of the Core Team was later presented to them for final review and approval. They were welcome to attend any of the Core Team meetings but could not be one of the three approved participants of the meetings who were authorized to represent their Department.

The Ground Rules

1. Each team had one vote in determining priority of requirements.
2. Each team's vote had the same weighting as every other team.
3. Each team was required to vote on the prioritization of all requirements including those that belonged to their own team.
4. The decisions of the Core Team were binding on all Departments. The sole caveat was if the Core Team proposal was rejected by Senior Management and a change in priorities ordered. (Incidentally, this never happened).

How It Worked

With the Core Team in place, we prioritized requirements for a release in the following manner.

We first prioritized Departments for a release and then we prioritized specific requirements that would be implemented. This was a key change from the way we functioned in the past. In prior releases, in theory, all Departments were given equal weighting and the requirements prioritized for development. In practice, the number of features each Department got determined what priority they got in a release. We decided to take the politics and guess work out and made it the first decision the Core Team made for each release.

The prioritizing of Departments was not arbitrary. The first pass at prioritizing Departments for a release was done by the System Architect. He took inputs from Senior Management to ensure that there was alignment with the Business Goals and Objectives in creating the list. For example, if Management has defined "Reduction of Scrapped Materials" as a key initiative going forward, Sampling would move to the top of the featured Departments for the next release.

The Core Team was then provided the list, the rationale behind the list and given a chance to vote on the list. Each Department was given 15 minutes to make a case for why they should stay where they were slotted, move up or move down. (Yes believe it or not, once the process was locked in, Departments actually were willing to move down and not shy of saying so!). After the presentations were done, the Team voted for each position on the list and decided which Department would get slotted in where. There were a total of 8 Departments and if you made it to the top 5, you were guaranteed on getting a meaningful number of features in a release. The bottom 3 invariably got features but their features were lighter and typically done to ensure that no dependencies with other Departments were missed.

Once we decided on the Departmental priorities, each Department provided their own prioritized list of features. We usually restricted these to about 5 to 7 per Department for the first pass and iterated on till we felt we had no more development cycles left in the release. In presenting their list, each Department had to provide a justification as to why the feature being requested was important and how it aligned with management priorities. Votes were taken immediately and superfluous features eliminated quite efficiently. As this process was executed, we typically emerged with a list of candidate features for a release within 2 or 3 meetings. In all these meetings, a few representatives from Development were always at hand to provide guidance to the team in terms of effort and degree of difficulty to implement certain features so that the final list of required features was realistic.

This prioritized list was provided to Development for a final sanity check in terms of time, manpower and other resources for feasibility of executing within a release cycle. Based on their feedback, some additional fine tuning was done in terms of adding / removing features and the final list was generated. This final list was voted on by the Core Team and submitted to management for final approval.

Once we instituted this method, we saw the following benefits.

1. Features were implemented that made sense to the whole and not just individual parts of the overall application. These features were in alignment with management objectives and priorities.
2. A significant reduction in the number of missed dependencies across Departments.
3. A dramatic improvement in the satisfaction with the overall process by which features were prioritized and implemented for a release.
4. Development deliveries, quality and schedules improved. The features were frozen and did not change unless there was some unexpected business or technical development that dictated a change in features and schedules. These were for the most part minimal and when they did occur were always accompanied by an adjustment to the schedules.
5. Better quality product since every Department was better able to plan the time and availability of their key resources to provide the necessary support to the requirements and development process.
6. Higher quality requirements since there was much sharper focus on what was needed and going to be delivered.

The above methodology can be replicated easily and successfully in complex development environments where key stakeholders span different functional areas in the company.

The Seilevel 2009 Software Requirements Holiday Medley

It's that time of year we all look so forward to, when we get to wish our colleagues around the requirements world a bit of SeiCheer with our holiday medley of songs. And worry not, if the 2009 collection isn't enough for you, you can go back in history and read our 2008 songs, 2007 songs, and our original 2006 songs!

Without further ado, sing along with us....

We wish you a Merry Release
We wish you a Merry Release
We wish you a Merry Release
We wish you a Merry Release and we hope it is near.
Requirements we bring to you and the team
Requirements for Release and we hope it is near.

Oh, bring us a new prototype
Oh, bring us a new prototype
Oh, bring us a new prototype and we'll love it, no fear

We won't go until we see it
We won't go until we see it
We won't go until we see it, so send the link here

We wish you a Merry Release
We wish you a Merry Release
We wish you a Merry Release and we hope it is near!

Oh Project SME
Oh Project SME! O Project SME!
Thy needs are so unchanging
O Project SME! O Project SME!
Thy needs are so unchanging
Not only at start are they clear,
But also when 'tis launch is near.
O Project SME! O Project SME!
Thy needs are so unchanging!

O Project SME! O Project SME!
Much time thou can'st give me
O Project SME! O Project SME!
Much time thou can'st give me
How often has the Project SME
Afforded us the scope for free!
O Project SME! O Project SME!
Much time thou can'st give me.

Rockin' Around the Requirements
Rocking around the Requirements
at the discovery workshop
Feature lists hung where you can see
Ev'ry executive tries to stop

You will get a validated feeling
When you hear voices saying
"Let's be jolly; Deck the walls with flows, oh golly!"

Rocking around the Requirements
Have a happy launch day
Everyone's drawing merrily
In a new best practice way

Rocking around the Requirements
Let the user stories sing
Later we'll write some data flows
and we'll do some modeling

You will get a validated feeling
When you hear voices saying
"Let's be jolly; Deck the walls with flows, oh golly"

Rocking around the Requirements
Have a happy launch day
Everyone's drawing merrily
In a new best practiced way

Rudolph the Brown-Nosing BA
Rudolph the brown-nosing BA
had a huge need to know.
And those who ever met him,
hoped they'd just let him go

All of the other BAs
used to scowl and call him names.
They never let poor Rudolph
join in any BA games.

Then one foggy release eve
VP came to say:
"Rudolph you are so very bright,
won't you guide my launch tonight?"

Then all the BAs loved him
as they shouted out with glee,
Rudolph the brown-nosing BA,
make our sponsors so happy!

First call for papers for RE'10. Can you hear the kangaroos calling us?

Pack your bags folks, we are heading to Australia in 2010! I'm excited to post the first call for papers (CFP) for IEEE's RE'10, held in Sydney Australia next September. I'll copy the key components of the CFP here, but visit the link for more details. I'm excited about this because we'll be working closely with conference organizers to ensure a very strong industry track - with many enhancements/improvements over past years conferences to help attract a great set of practitioners from the Product Management and Business Analyst communities as well!

CALL FOR PAPERS AND PROPOSALS

18th IEEE International

Requirements Engineering Conference

REQUIREMENTS ENGINEERING IN A MULTI- FACETED WORLD

September 27 - October 1, 2010

University of Technology, Sydney

http://www.re10.org

Important Dates

Technical and industrial paper abstracts due: February 12th, 2010 Full papers due: February 19th, 2010 Tutorials & Workshop proposals: March 15th, 2010.

Some Context

Software systems in today’s multi-faceted world are as diverse as the people who use them. While some are built according to rigorous government regulations, others must be delivered quickly to meet time-to-market deadlines or must be responsive to changing business needs. From a requirements engineering perspective, there is certainly no ‘one-size-fits-all’ solution.

RE’10 will explore techniques and methods for eliciting, analyzing, specifying, and managing requirements across diverse development teams where stakeholders often come from entirely different cultural, linguistic, geographical, and educational backgrounds; and across a broad spectrum of software projects that encompass both formal and informal development techniques and represent both small and very large scale projects.

Do you need help?

If you have never previously published at a major international conference, then you may be eligible for our mentoring program.

Please check the RE’10 website for further details.

Resource with Tips for Virtual Teams

I am a huge fan of Thiagi's work on games to use in training. He has made many games publicly available for use in your own training environments. In the past I've done some writing (here) about how we've adapted his games to Requirements Engineering training courses. But today I was browsing his site and found something I thought might be useful to others. He has posted a list of tips for virtual teams. There are just over 100 simple tips, that if you just skim the list I'm sure you'll find a handful of them can be applied immediately in your organization.

Does anyone have comments on ones you will start to use or additional tips to add?

Delivering Business Value with Agile Approaches to Requirements, continued

This post is a continuation of a previous post found here.

Changes Dave believes are coming with respect to agile-run projects and my own commentary on these:

• Requirements engineers make decisions, they are not just documenters. Expect to see that product owners are the BAs. They will less often be called systems analysts, and more often called product owners. A few years ago, we shifted from calling our requirements team members “Business Analysts” and started calling them “Product Managers” because that’s really what they have to do – own the product, even if it’s just an internal IT system.


• BAs/Product Owners will be empowered to make decisions and not just sit around waiting on sign-off. They must be experts in the business. They must work with development, not just document for them. Once they do this, they can start to make very smart decisions about what should or should not make it in the product.


• Agile is not a fad, even NASA is doing it. That said, we will see variations on agile as it grows and evolves.


• The development team can add value about requirements, so collaborate with them. They don’t all just want to gold-plate scope or push back on what’s in or out – they love to build products, so use that to your advantage.


• The business is not always right, so you still need to ask questions. BAs/Product Owners must push back when something doesn’t make sense.


• Agile is actually seen to increase the value of requirements – just make them more solution focused, and not just about doing lots of documentation.

And finally, Dave made my favorite quote from RE’09: The difference between UML 1 and UML 3 is that we moved the stick hands from being straight out to angled downwards. He can make jokes like this since he actually worked on it!

Delivering Business Value with Agile Approaches to Requirements

I attended a keynote at RE’09 in Atlanta that I wanted to go back and post a summary of and my thoughts on. And just to be completely honest, this is a rarity. For whatever reason, I really tend not to get much value out of keynote talks – either they are too technical, the speaker isn’t great at well, speaking, or they are so out there I cannot engage in it. Today was different though, it was captivating for me. This one was given by Dave West of Forrester Research. The talk was titled “Developing Business Value with Agile Approaches to Requirements”.


To be fair, he had my attention at the first slide – it was a picture of a dog doing agility. When I talk about agile, I use such a picture too since I personally do agility with my dog! Anyway, the content of the talk proved to be interesting. Some will say it wasn’t anything new. Others will argue with what he said. But for me, his ideas were very tightly aligned with our experiences and ideas about agile and requirements so I like that it built on what I already knew and gave me new ideas to think about. The great thing is he has a much larger pool of resources to survey and confirm his ideas. Here are a few of the points of interest.


He talked to what is being adopted with respect to agile and among those things: Agile itself is being adopted. Scrum practices are as well. He also sees engineering practices such as early testing, integrated builds, and re-factoring. But most of note, he is most commonly seeing a hybrid of approaches– more of an agile than an Agile approach. I think this is relevant as I hear company after company say “agile didn’t work for us”. In reality for many companies it probably doesn’t in its purest of form. Or perhaps it requires trying it more than once, learning from mistakes (do we really think Waterfall worked the first time either?!?!).


Some really positive things he believes we are seeing now include frequent delivery, increased business involvement with more collaboration, and changes in team organization towards smaller teams and more of a team focus in general. His thought on when agile is best used: Complex projects where there are problems to be solved and the solution is unknown.


Dave spoke to the common friction points between traditional requirements approaches and agile:

• Delivers requirements vs collaboration on the product
• Where in the process you engage vs. iterative
• Requirements that are out of date, long/hard to read, solution focused, take way too long vs. collaborative and timely requirements

Some of the issues that you must be careful about with agile: Often the customer has no time because they are doing their day-job (the one you are trying to help in some way with software!). There are often many customers to involve in the requirements efforts, not just one or two to quickly jot down stories with. The customers are often distributed so you have to bake in time to work with all of them alone and together. Agile is reliant on good communication but stereotypically, developers don’t communicate well. We cannot ignore analysis - processes require analysis and solutions require thought - so take time to do these.


I will continue this post in a day or so with thoughts on changes that Dave thinks we are starting to see, as well as my personal thoughts on his thoughts!

An example of Blueprint in Use on an Agile Project

I attended a talk by folks from BluePrint and Lexis Nexis at BAWorld on Tuesday at BAWorld: Boston called "Requirements Definition for Agile Projects". The first bit of the talk was just an intro to agile and why it is useful on the projects. The part that I found most interesting was from Kathleen McGoey who owned business analysis on lawyers.com - she effectively gave a verbal case study of their team using agile and Blueprint to deploy this site. This was refreshing because she was brutally honest about the state of their organization 2 years ago, some of her dislikes about other tools, and their experiences with agile not going well. However, she also then talked about how their culture is changing now and what is working really well. This talk was great because it was effectively a great sales-pitch for Blueprint, but it was given by an actual user....and you could tell she was being honest about it.

Blueprint is meant to be a BA tool. They are closely partnered with HP and it integrates to Quality Center for QA use as well. From a quick glance of things she mentioned or showed, it looks like it allows you to manage the list of features in a backlog, low-fidelity wireframes, diagrams that look a lot like visio, export to Word, and import from Excel. We are still using Borland's Caliber happily, but I'm obviously always looking at all the tools on the market to see what people are really liking and/or disliking, what new features are coming about, what's easy to use, etc.

A bit about the lawyers.com project - they were executing 3-12 week sprints and the requirements definition is about 2 weeks ahead of sprint cycles. She made a very wise comment - templates and processes are good to an end, but only if the BA knows what they are doing already. She spoke of junior analysts who are given templates and when you look at their work products you think “Oh no! what are you doing!”. I think we’ve all probably seen that. You can use the templates and processes to train them, but they aren’t enough, but they aren’t enough.

Another neat thing she briefly mentioned was the idea of doing something like pair-programming, but where the pair consists of a BA and a user experience expert – so together they are designing the wireframes. I haven’t tried it, typically our individuals are doing both activities.

Anyway, it was good to hear the “how it works” story from Lexis Nexis. And I haven't used Blueprint myself, but I am certainly interested to hear others' experiences with the tool, so please comment if you have used it.

Creating BA Competency

As part of our Live from BAWorld: Boston series, I just heard a talk from Karen McKay at Doreen Evans Associates (DEA). She discussed building a BA competency in your organization. Her talk was focused on the high-level need for such a model and what the components of it are. I think a next level of discussion that would be interesting is tactics you could use to create one yourself - which specific tools and tactics work.

At DEA, they use a model that is very similar to the CMM, with five levels of competency: initial, repeatable, defined, managed, optimized and have helped build this at a handful of organizations. We do something similar to build BA maturity in organizations, but I haven't actually seen it laid out next to the CMM model quite like this. At the requirements process level, they use requirements models which I applaud - context diagrams, org charts, use cases, process flows, DFDs, etc. This talk further validated what I'm seeing in industry - alas, models are really the current state now. So if you write your requirements in plain old text, I fear that is really seen as out-of-date "technology" and you need to look at visualization techniques.

Something interesting that she did with her slides was to describe parts of their competency models using requirements models. For example, there is a swimlane diagram to show the BA role - clearly showing how BA activities relate to IT and PM functions. I haven't done much of this recently and think it's a great idea that I will use.

Anyway, this is a topic that I'm definitely interested in as we try to help customers build their competency around requirements as well. It seems like organizations are really recognizing the value of BAs now!

Using Use Cases To Create Test Cases

As part of my "Live from BAWorld: Boston" series, I attended a talk Monday by Matthew Leach of Doreen Evan Associates called "Leveraging Multi-Level Use Cases for Testing and Other Ways to Obtain Greater ROI on your Business Analysis Investment".

His talk went into great depth about how you could use use cases on your project in multiple ways, looking at different levels of detail in use cases. He quoted a study from VokeStream that indicated 76% of people surveyed manually build test cases still.

This is the one point I also wanted to emphasize the importance of: re-use your use cases to generate test cases, particularly user acceptance test scripts (UAT scripts). At some level this seems obvious to me, but I don't think it is all that obvious after all based on the above study, Matthew's experiences, and my personal ones as well! On a recent project I worked on, the business came to us to talk about how awful the integration and unit test cases were - that they just would not work for UAT. My immediate thought was "well of course not, those aren't meant for UAT". Apparently QA had told them to write their UAT scripts from these test cases. That's almost as challenging as writing them from code! So we walked them through how we could take the use cases we had written (which the existing test cases were generated from) and easily translate those into UAT scripts.

If you think of your use case having a happy path and alternative paths, you would want to blow out each of those paths into at least 1 test case each, by adding concrete data to the use case. So for example, if there is a step for the user to input "shipping information", then in the UAT script, you would want to supply actual shipping information including a specific name and address that would be in the test data set. It's important during UAT to also test the alternate and exception paths - to ensure the not-so-happy path and errors are handled to the business' satisfaction. That said, it's also unrealistic to think your users have time to test all possible paths. To mitigate this, I have two suggestions.

1. Pick the most important UAT scripts to test. You have to decide what "important" is, but it would be wise to look at the use cases that add the most business value and/or are most frequently used.
2. Use your BAs during UAT - particularly for the less important test cases that the users can't it.

BAs Need to Think Quietly

Also at BAWorld: Boston, Monday I heard Barbara Carkenoard talk about "ROI? Measuring the Real Value of Business Analysis" and her learning objectives were:

• Learn to talk about the specific value of a strong business analysis discipline
• Consider business analysis metrics for use in your organization
• Understand why a financial ROI is not normally calculated for business analysis

Some of the key points of interest for me were these, with my own commentary:

Business analysts should be involved in creating the business case. Most projects don't bring them in until the project is already decided upon. But business analysts inherently are good at analysis and can really think through whether a project even makes sense.

Business analysts need to figure out how to block out big chunks of time to think quietly. Analysis requires thinking...so let them think!

An interesting discussion took place around cultural differences between countries and how it relates to the use of process or lack of. This came out of a question about why organizations try to short-cut business analysis on the projects. And Barbara proposed that the US culture is one of "hurry up, slam it in, we'll fix it later" whereas a lot of other countries (she named Canada and the UK) are more likely to follow a process to get it done right. I laughed because just last week I had an executive say "It's okay if we don't get all the requirements defined, we'll just log everything not yet written down as defects and fix them in QA"...and he was very serious about it.

Live from BAWorld Boston

This week I find myself at Project Summit & BAWorld: Boston for about a day and a half.

This morning I presented our talk, "If you Build It, Will They Use It? Leveraging Business Objectives to Deliver Successful Projects". One thing I like about the BAWorld symposiums is that they make the slides available electronically to everyone, they are reviewed by a committee before you can present them, and they insist that the speakers provide learning objectives so you know what you are getting. So to that point, here are the learning objectives for my discussion:

• Understand how Business Objectives are vital to businesses
• Understand how to elicit and write good Business Objectives
• Understand how to use Business Objectives to assess measurable value of individual features

I had a blast with the audience here - great participation in some of my games (yes, we do them in presentations, not just our training classes!).

If you haven't been to one of these conferences, I recommend it if you are a practitioner doing Business Analysis, Requirements Engineering, or Product Management. Everyone else here is also practicing the "art" of BA and looking for new tips and techniques to take back to their organizations.

Anyway, I attended a few other talks of interest today that I'll blog about shortly!

Software Requirements Soundtrack

I am going to take it a little off the beaten path for this post and ask about some 'non-functional' work requirements you have. So I was wondering what you all like to do when you have to stay focused? Do you listen to classical? Work remotely from a coffee shop or home? Put a big frown face on your office whiteboard warning intruders to stay away?


I personally have my ear buds on hand wherever I go to work. They help me whenever I need to keep my head down and not be distracted. Granted, the slow and methodical opening of 20 or so metal blinds with 5 or 6 pulls each isn't easily drown out.



I favor listening to either Classical or Spanish Guitar music for working at the client site or office. Not for the 'classical makes your baby smart' argument. I do find that these two types of music help instill a calm demeanor and have enough movement in the music to help you get into a pattern. The ear buds themselves do the work of drowning out the background conversations regarding the explosion of a stress ball and its contents upon the ceiling.


Alternatively. When I have a large quantity of documents to review or large processes/maps to create, I favor my home office. I can't help but need a great chair, huge monitor, and fast internet for researching in these cases. Granted my music changes to more modern content to keep the mind from burning out on the same tasks. But in either case, I welcome some interruption since I am not the only one with deadlines.



Do you have different styles of work when it is focus time? Let us know, we would love to hear back from you. Perhaps you had a moment that you really wished you had some way to stay focused.

Live from RE'09: New Ideas for Requirements Activities in Distributed Teams

Olly Gotel from Pace University presented work she has done with colleagues from around the world in a paper titled Distributing Responsibilities to Engineer Better Requirements: Leveraging Knowledge and Perspectives for Students to Learn a Key Skill. Olly started this talk by telling us that she had done something crazy with this project, and then went on to explain how they had essentially five different teams working on a project from five locations around the world. They were each supposed to write requirements for a software development competition, with requirements teaching and coaching help along the way from professors and experienced students. As she went on to describe the experience, many of us from industry chuckled with her out of empathy – her experience is so similar to our worlds today where the teams are distributed worldwide and chaos ensues!

There are a couple concepts from Olly’s course design that I think would be great to replicate in industry – either from a training perspective or project execution. The first one is related to creating competition to improve results. In past iterations of this learning experience, Olly explained they had issues with the students not understanding the value of producing quality requirements, which naturally resulted in poor results. So this time they had the teams compete with one another by creating the same deliverables and having the client choose which solution was best. As expected, the competition significantly increased the quality of their work products. We have done this with our training courses – introduced friendly competition through game playing and I’ve been pleased with the level of engagement. However I think there is something interesting to think about here with respect to injecting a different type of friendly competition into project execution in industry. Fundamentally the big turn-off to this idea in industry is that there are five times the costs to create the single project – so it's a lot of throw-away work. But, if we think outside the box a bit, perhaps we can divide projects into chunks (or just use multiple projects) and have the requirements sub-teams compete on quality of specifications, requirements issue resolution speeds, project success rates, etc.

In this course, they used an apprentice model with coaches who were students that had previously completed the requirements engineering classes. Now I think this is something that absolutely applies as-is! You can just have mentors who are more experienced people mentoring the more junior resources in requirements activities – ideally pairing them up on the same projects.

Live from RE’09: Taking Distance Requirements Training to a New Level

Didar Zowghi gave one of the most interesting talks at REET'09 I’ve heard in awhile titled Teaching Requirements Engineering to the Baha’I Students in Iran Who Are Denied of Higher Education. She was asked to teach a distance learning course on requirements engineering to these students from Australia to Iran.

She basically runs the course by teaching lectures using audio and displaying the lecture slides using Skype or LiveMeeting. However, they ran into issues with everything from bad audio connections, students who couldn’t see the visual slides, and even power outages. One improvement made eventually was to record her lectures so students could download them to play if they couldn’t hear for some reason during the live presentation. As a bonus, Didar said she learned of things she could work on by listening to herself lecture for the first time!

She had assignments for the students as well, but specifically she had a project where they had to interview a stakeholder to elicit and document requirements. She had a Teaching Assistant located in Iran who played the role of stakeholder – sometimes in person, sometimes by phone. She had the students use Karl Wieger’s templates since those were also easily downloadable.

Didar also makes time to chat with students – they might Skype her for example to find a time to chat verbally. I like to think of these as virtual office hours!

I found Didar’s talk to be so interesting based on the circumstances behind it – a great culture lesson that I thank her for. But I also find it quite relevant as we work to roll out global training programs. I am sometimes overwhelmed by the idea of how we will possibly have successful training with people on the other side of the world, but the reality is – you just make it work.

Live from RE'09: Contextual Requirements Experiences within the Software Enterprise

Kevin Gary from Arizona State University presented Contextual Requirements within the Software Enterprise at REET’09. He discussed their approach in having a multi-year project-based engineering course sequence, allowing for iterative exposure to all concepts - but particularly of interest: requirements engineering. This very much fits with popular learning theory – the idea we need to put concepts in front of students repetitively for them to really learn them. For their projects, they reach out to industry to find candidate projects so the students get to work with real subject experts to solve real problems, ultimately producing real deliverables. What I like about his style is that he is less interested in whether the company gets their perfect solution out of this work and instead he is more interested in whether the student is learning the concepts. But in reality, it sounds like the companies are getting a lot of value out of it!

One of the challenges Kevin spoke to involves how you assess students in courses like these. One thing I do like that I haven’t seen often is that he tries to check in with industry managers that hire his students to see if they are coming out of the ASU program more prepared.

So what I like about Kevin’s discussion first of all is that assessment of students is hard! We see that too and it was a big topic in an REET panel later in the week at RE’09. But I really think it’s great to see universities with programs really aimed at setting the students up for success in industry after graduation. And the final point I’ll make is that he’s absolutely right about needing students to practice the lessons lectured and hear them more than once. I think this is a major flaw in much of the requirements training offered to industry right now. We send students in for a class and then expect them to get it all - typically without revisiting the materials again.

REET’09 Went Off Without a Hitch!

Monday was the Requirements Engineering Education and Training (REET) workshop that I co-chaired with Ljerka Beus-Dukic. I’m always nervous about how these things will go – there are so many unknowns with the environment, the presentations, and the timing. However, I’m absolutely thrilled with the end result! We had 6 papers presented and it varies from a normal conference in that we had big blocks of discussion to really dive into some of the commonly shared issues in this field.

We had a lengthy discussion mid-afternoon around how do you really teach anything about requirements to students in a semester long class (or less!) and where does requirements training fit in the overall teaching of the software lifecycle at a university level. The thought is that most people learning about requirements in industry aren’t brand new to software development, they already understand a bit about coding and verification, so they understand the value and context for requirements. Yet trying to teach it to a freshman class would leave the students thinking “why do I need to know this?”

Another key point that is important at all levels is repetition in the lessons they receive. It came up again in the context of academia, where they may teach it to freshmen, and then they need to re-teach it throughout in other classes. This isn’t specific to requirements certainly, just a basic principle of good training.

We also talked quite a bit about how you assess the students in and after training. This is a long standing BIG problem across academia and industry. One issue with assessing whether any behaviors changed in an academic environment is that you teach it and they may use it on a project, but then you never see the students again. One participant actually tries to talk to industry contacts who hire the students to see if they see better results from his students. In industry, it’s very hard to isolate whether results are attributed to training. We can look for modified behavior, but this requires a dedicated resource to do so. I’ll probably talk about this more in a day or so, since we have a panel related to this on Thursday!

We then ended the day with 3 different sets of training activities presented with the intent on getting any participant feedback on the activities, but also leaving the workshop participants with the opportunity to take the exercises back and reuse them. At the very end, we played one of our Seilevel training games: Bet on Yourself Pictionary – it was fun because I was working with a group of people who are already familiar with requirements models in some form and so they could play our game – which basically enlists 2 “students” to act as analysts drawing requirements models for a specified scenario, trying to get the rest of the class to elicit the requirements from them. Oh and they had to do all of this without speaking. It was great fun and if nothing else, a lively way to end the day!

Live postings from RE'09 next week!

It's one of my favorite times of year, time for the IEEE Requirements Engineering conference! RE'09 is just around the corner, starting next week in Atlanta, GA.

I'll be co-charining the Requirements Engineering Education and Training (REET'09) workshop on Monday and then attending the main conference the rest of the week, with 2 panel appearances that should prove to be interesting.

And as always, I'll be blogging LIVE from RE'09! I hope to see some of you there, find me if you are attending this year!

A Better Way to Write a Use Case: Plain English

I was talking to a colleague recently about use cases and it got me thinking about my evolution as a use-case-writer. I used to do formal use cases exclusively – where they very clearly denoted system and user steps (whether in one list or 2 columns), preconditions, triggers, Postconditions, etc. etc. etc.

After years of writing and teaching about formal use cases, I have to confess, I rarely write them now. Sometimes I still teach about them, I think it’s important to know how to write good ones. But the reality is that as we move towards shorter-iterations on our projects, the less formal we need them to be in the use case itself. What I’m finding works really well are these use cases written more like user stories. They may still have a linear set of steps, but the big difference is they are written in a more readable language of plain English with slightly less structure.

I’m oversimplifying but to make my point, instead of:

1. System displays shipping fields

2. User enters shipping info

3. System displays payment options

4. User enters payment options

I could simply say:

User enters shipping and then enters payment information.

I’ve conveyed the same information without stating the literally obvious points. You have to be careful here though, don’t assume the obvious incorrectly! Now, before you agile non-documenters jump up and down and say “I told you so!”, I want to be clear – you still need to write something down. This is the part that many projects neglect to tackle is the next level of detail. You still need to capture specific functional requirements for this use case/user story – there are our typical RML™ – with people, systems, data models to be created that describe those requirements, So I use the user stories, just like I used a formal use case – stepping through each “step” and determining what details need to be specified for building the software. Oh and one more thing, I do still use preconditions, triggers, and actors in the header – just makes it cleaner to call those out up top.

Register now for REET09 and RE09!! Early registration ends Monday

Please join us for an interactive discussion at the Fourth International Workshop on Requirements Engineering Education and Training (REET'09) in conjunction with the 17th International Requirements Engineering Conference (RE’09). The workshop will be held in Atlanta, Georgia, USA on August 31, 2009.

If you have any interest in training and education in the fields of requirements engineering, business analysis, or product management - this will be an exciting day to learn about new ideas in the field!

Following the success of the first, second, and third International Workshop on Requirements Engineering Education and Training (REET 2005, 2007, and 2008), this workshop will address issues related to RE education, both as part of a formal university degree and as ongoing skills training within the workplace. The workshop is intended to go much deeper than a surface discussion of curriculum issues and will examine specific ideas and techniques for teaching skills needed by an effective requirements engineer.

Five Tips For Creating Successful Projects in a Down Economy

We are certainly living in interesting times, and according to conventional wisdom, it is a curse to live in interesting times. Changes in our world happen almost overnight, from the political to the geographic to the financial. Pundits, pollsters and prophets may disagree on many things, but for now, most agree that the global financial outlook for 2009 isn’t good. Recent publications targeting everyone from requirements analysts to CIOs have espoused the importance of good software development practices in the face of bad financial times. While those articles may speak the truth (and I believe that they do), unfortunately some of us will face cutbacks in resources in the coming year.

Also unfortunately, requirements management is one of the software development areas that often gets put on the chopping block during resource cuts (along with other important areas like usability, user documentation, testing, architecture and even coding itself). As software requirements practitioners, it behooves us (yes, I said “behooves”) to be prepared for any reduction in requirements management resources, whatever the reason. Given the current financial environment, though, the need to be prepared may take on additional importance today. Hopefully the following five simple suggestions will help you be prepared in case you’re faced with this challenge in the coming year.


1. Establish and use a requirements management framework

Many times, requirements management teams sprout out of necessity. The ways in which requirements are elicited, documented and managed may be ad hoc, or even haphazard. When there are enough people to manage that sort of process and catch things before they fall through the cracks, such an ad hoc approach may suffice. When resources are limited, though, expending energy to reinvent the process wheel on each project is no longer an option. By establishing a requirements management framework complete with standard methodologies, processes and templates, you will take the guesswork out of your requirements work. A standard framework also helps you evaluate each project’s needs objectively, making those inevitable conversations about what can and can’t be done within a limited timeframe and with limited budget a bit easier.

2. Use tools effectively

One common piece of a requirements management framework is a suite of tools. Requirements tool categories range from document management to team collaboration to requirements documentation and traceability. While each type of tool certainly has a place in requirements management, they are often viewed as quick-fix solutions. An attempt to put a toolset on top of a broken process, or to simply replace requirements analysts with a requirements management tool, is likely to fail. Instead, recognize the specific tasks for which tools are good and use them for those. Version control, traceability management, spell-checking, and document generation are easy tasks for a computer. Talking with users, pulling together different pieces of information into a sensible whole, and drawing conclusions are better done by people. Remember that tools alone can’t fix a broken requirements process – tools are aids for, not a replacement of, skilled analysts.

3. Use metrics to reinforce the value of requirements management

Unfortunately, just saying that you have a framework in place and that you’re using tools effectively might not be enough evidence of the value of requirements management. If you’re not already doing so, begin capturing metrics in order to reinforce the value your work provides – you can start small and expand the scope of your metrics in order to fit your particular organizational situation. Some sample requirements metrics include rate of requirements change, percent of requirements implemented, and average time spent to document a requirement. While these metrics may be interesting for a single project, they begin to provide real value when they are compared over time, indicating how the framework is improving requirements practice. In addition to capturing requirement-specific metrics, it is extremely valuable to capture project-level metrics, including user adoption, user satisfaction, usability, achievement of project objectives, and return on investment. When you can show how your requirements work positively impacts the company’s bottom line, you take requirements management off the table during discussions of resource cuts.

4. Employ a satisficing approach, focused on what’s important right now

Generally speaking, satisficing is an approach which focuses on adequacy over perfection – you’re done when you have a “good enough” answer, rather than “the ultimate” answer. For example, I recently sent an SRS document out for review even though it wasn’t complete. The information I did have was good enough for comment by my reviewers, and the feedback I received from the team helped me know what other information was required in order to move us to the next step in the development process. Another example of satisficing in requirements management would be documenting the high-priority use cases in formal detail, while simply capturing a skeleton of the lower-priority ones. Satisficing allows you to continue to make progress on the overall project even when you don’t have all of the information that will be required eventually. It also shows the rest of the team that you’re interested in working together on the highest priority issues, rather than sacrificing “the good” in an effort to reach “the great.” Chances are, “the good” is indeed good enough.

5. Strengthen interpersonal relationships, both horizontally and vertically

When there are fewer people around to do the work, you may have to rely more heavily on others to help you succeed. It’s easy to see how important your relationships with other requirements practitioners are, but your other relationships within the organization are also more important than ever. Being able to turn to your documentation specialist for a review of your SRS, or getting an early heads-up from the development team about the feasibility of implementing a requirement, or simply knowing that your team is functioning as a team rather than a group of silos, can be invaluable during lean projects. In addition to shoring up relationships with your peers, this is a great time to establish or strengthen ties up the org chart. Many people aren’t as comfortable speaking with managers, directors, and VPs, but having their support for you and your work can help prioritize requirements management among their peers, and any support we can get from management is great!

Interesting times often call for simple, direct solutions. If your requirements management group isn’t impacted today, hopefully these suggestions will provide you with ideas for ways to make sure that you won’t be tomorrow. If you do face challenges as a result of the current financial environment, these suggestions should help you do more with less.

RML™ Requirements Model 5 - The Data Flow Diagram (DFD)

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 use a DFD?” This answer comes from my own (unique) view of the world, so some of you probably won’t relate to it, but others will--I’m sure there is at least one more out there…

Sometimes I have what I think of as an "equation" in my head. In vague terms, I may be thinking “Customer Data + Product Data + Input from Sales Rep + Taxes = Order”. But that's not really right, nor is the equation a good representation of the information.

And, the “equation” also misses a few other particulars about creating an order that I’d like to convey: Sales Reps update customer data, the Finance staff maintains the rules for the tax calculations, and orders flow to the Order Fulfillment system after creation.

The data flow diagram is great for representing all of this. Here’s my “equation,” expressed as a data flow diagram:

I have found that business users, as well as developers, react well to this model—it provides a “big picture” with which to begin a conversation about creating an order. It paints exactly the picture I want to convey and validate when I’m thinking “Customer Data + Product Data + Input from Sales Rep + Taxes = Order”.

Display this picture, and you’ll get some interesting questions and comments:

• How is customer data populated initially?


• Does the order fulfillment system update the order store with information about the fulfillment of the orders?


• Where does the product data come from?


• Are all of the tax rules manually entered, or is there also an electronic source for them?


• And, maybe, “No, that’s wrong, updating customer data isn’t a separate process. Customer updates need to automatically flow out of changes made when creating the order.”
  

One note: it doesn’t have to be technically perfect to be useful. I often provide “conceptual” DFDs, in that I intentionally provide conceptual, but not technical information. For example, conceptually, there is a “products” data store. Technically, there may be multiple stores: product list, product descriptions, etc. The important thing is that they work together to provide product data. Developers and architects are very receptive to this; they understand I’m illustrating the behaviors of the system without defining the implementation (which, after all, is their job). Oh, and how does the audience know it is conceptual? I put the word “conceptual” in the title!

You may notice I didn’t number my processes. That’s because I rarely decompose them and many people tend to take the numbering as ordering. So, for my usage, numbering adds confusion rather than clarity.

Happy diagramming!

Related Articles:

How To Choose A Software Requirements Model

Six Requirements Models For Agile Projects