I attended the BusinessAnalystWorld Symposium in Atlanta last week. One of the speakers whom I enjoyed was Keith Barrett from ProcessExchange Inc. http://www.process-exchange.com/
Keith spoke about Reuse Based Requirements Development & Management (RBRDM). I was very glad to hear someone at the symposium talking about requirements reuse because it is an area that I think we should be talking about a lot more. In defining his terms Keith defined Requirements Development as all of the work that is done to elicit, analyze, and document the requirements. He acknowledged that many requirements are still written in text and that textual requirements are difficult for software developers to use and difficult to manage for reuse.
He defined Requirements Management as the ongoing management of requirements from the point that they are created throughout the project and after implementation continuing on for the life of the business or the system that they describe. Only if the requirements are managed on an ongoing basis are they available for reuse on later projects.
A couple of other key points that Keith emphasized: requirements are valuable corporate assets and as such should be treated with care and respect. They should be developed carefully using standard approaches and common formats and they should be stored in a common repository. Also, Keith's experience with reusability in the development world taught him that reusability is best leveraged when components are grouped into "families" of related components so that they can easily be found and understood when needed.
In discussing the currently available Requirements Management tools in the marketplace Keith and the audience agreed that none of them have all of the feature/characteristics that we would like to help us manage requirements. We look forward to these tools becoming more sophisticated in the coming years.
June 29th, 2007 at 1:53 am
That is an excellent idea. The requirements documents and I would say even the Minutes of Meetings of the requirement elicitation sessions should be properly classified and shared in a proper KM tool.
I have experienced that many a times even in the same project if the stakeholders are meeting to decide on the same issue after a period of time, unless they have access to what has been discussed and agreed on the last time, they will come to some different conclusion.
Also ‘reusing’ the requirments will ensure maximum return on the time and effort invested.
July 23rd, 2007 at 1:51 pm
This sounds a lot like the reuse of patterns in the works “Design Patterns” and “Pattern-Oriented Software Architecture”,…; or maybe not…?
However, patterns can be used in business/system analysis work as well. It is a “patterns” of a business process that gets captured and explained for the specific application on hand in a Software Requirements Specification. If one catalogues these business problems and maps them to the particular analysis model, one finds repetition; hence a pattern.
Just as in the development phase we find re-usable patterns, they exist at a higher level, i.e. the BA/SA level, as well.