Unveil the techniques to address the 5 Deadly Errors in Requirements Management (Including examples):
Every significant norm, accreditation, and regulatory institution stresses the importance and value of well-articulated requirements in designing a product.
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In fact, numerous resources are dedicated to outlining requirements and ideal practices.
However, despite extensive experience, businesses continue to find difficulty not only in drafting but also in handling requirements and incorporating them into their product design process.
What You Will Discover:
Mistakes in Requirements Management and Methods to Rectify Them
Highlighted below are five critical errors commonly seen within the sector of requirements management and requirement engineering.
Let’s Dive In!!
#1) Elicitation – Absence of Effective Communication
Over the years, we have observed challenges with requirements from the very beginning of projects. Several factors can contribute to a shaky initiation, one of which is a lack of adequate communication and understanding among stakeholders.
I had once collaborated with an organization that revised their internal product development procedure to fix inconsistencies between requests from sales and marketing groups and what the engineering departments were actually delivering.
The first project under the revised method encountered nearly the same issue as it did prior to the organizational process revision. This happened because they overlooked the core issue: a breakdown of communication.
The remedy involved designing a pre-requirement document titled “stakeholder needs.” This document allowed stakeholders to view their demands in their own language.
Along with documenting stakeholder requests in their own terms, we must also establish an acceptance criterion. This is a description of how the end user will perceive or experience the request. Then, we attach these desires or needs to measurable stakeholder requirements.
Developing this document before starting the actual requirements work lets our stakeholders understand how their initial ideas are transformed into more formal stakeholder requirements.
#2) Unclear Use of Related Requirements
A significant segment of my projects over time has involved teamwork rather than individual work.
Every engineer has access to all project documents, if necessary, and knows where to locate them. This transparent and open environment is well-received and provides a context for understanding how parts fit into the broader project scope.
However, one disadvantage to this scenario is that during the initial stages of development, some teams plan to share system resources without sufficiently discussing and integrating them with the proprietors of the associated subsystems.
In most instances, we discovered this to be the result of casual conversations or spontaneous cross-department meetings that were inadequately documented or communicated. Difficulties arise when a resource needs to be changed, but the other team planning to use that resource is uninformed of the modifications.
Here’s a simple Illustration: The mechanical engineers need an air temperature sensor in a specific area of the system. The computing team has a standard device that will be placed in that region, and one of their engineers mentions that it has built-in sensors.
The “mechanical team” investigates and determines that this device meets their needs, so they incorporate it into their design plans. Six months later, during cost cuts, the device is replaced, but no one informs the mechanical team, and they only find out during testing.
Processes can be set up to reduce these issues, and there are now tools on the market to integrate these checks into your requirements management software. Our solution was to enforce a cross-team check for all the requirements you plan to use, not just those within your subsystem or area of responsibility.
In the mentioned example, our mechanical team would mark that requirement and receive alerts if it was altered or changed. The ultimate aim is ensuring you have a process in place to track shared or complementary functions to prevent communication failures.
Suggested Reading => Top 20 Tools for Requirements Management
#3) Design According to the Requirement
A frequent pattern among novice or unseasoned companies is designing purely based on requirements.
Teams concentrate on how a device looks rather than its intended functionality. It is usual for individuals to start specifying screen sizes, number of buttons, workflows, and other details before clearly outlining the specific needs of the device.
Even though designs may include requirements, they are expressed in design documentation rather than individual high-level requirements.
For instance, some stakeholders may specify that a device must have a capacitive touch screen. This could indicate designing solely based on the requirement. Performance specifications, workflows, and environmental requirements can all affect decisions related to control systems like this one.
However, in such a situation, those design decisions supersede the engineers due to the specific requirement detailed in a high-level document. The ideal way to address these issues is to separate the requested feature into functional and design requirements.
Based on the example above, we can query the performance-related reasons for a touch screen while also formulating design concept documents concentrating on aesthetics and workflow requirements.
The technical criteria will instruct the engineers on performance requirements, while the concept artwork and workflow studies address formative aspects such as user experience and process flow.
#4) Evading Changes
Every organization I have partnered with has struggled with specification changes after approval has been granted.
The paradox is that these same organizations are unwilling to wait for a comprehensive requirements document, so high-level documents are being written while design work is underway.
No matter how proficient your team is, they cannot design and construct something when they do not know what it is supposed to be.
There’s a funny Dilbert cartoon where the boss tells Wally to start designing because they lack the time to work on the requirement. It’s humorous until your boss actually does it, which then makes it slightly disheartening.
The reality is that changes are always a part of any project. We should accept these changes and prepare for them. Client needs will shift, and as engineers and designers, we acquire new knowledge. All of this gives us more information and insight to create a better project.
Unfortunately, there are no easy or quick solutions for these types of issues. Setting up and maintaining traceability between different levels of specifications is the only way to identify impacted elements when something changes, especially when those changes affect multiple teams.
#5) Relying on Word and Excel
As time has passed, I have observed that almost all organizations at some point turn to using Word and Excel to back their requirements process. Word and Excel are cost-effective and intuitive tools for beginning to draft requirements.
Nearly everyone in the company is familiar with these tools.
However, the versioning of documents quickly becomes a challenge, and traceability matrices, often maintained in Excel, become a tangled mix of columns with references to unlinked documents. Maintaining both Word documents and Excel matrices in sync becomes a burdensome task.
Even without considering standard compliance, if you intend to make changes to your project (which you should), traceability becomes crucial. This is when a requirements management system like Visure Requirements becomes necessary to simplify the task and ease the load.
The requirements management tool becomes the key source for accessing and linking all data.
About the Writer
This article was authored for STH by Fernando Valera – Chief Technical Officer at Visure Solutions, Inc.
Fernando Valera completed his degree in Computer Engineering at the Complutense University in Madrid, Spain. Since then, he has been devoted to the field of Requirements Management and Requirements Engineering.
He has aided in the execution of Requirements Engineering methodologies, processes, and tools in firms across numerous countries and industries, including automotive, medical devices, banking and finance, aerospace and defense, and IT. He has trained over 500 individuals in total.
In 2012, he moved to Visure Solutions, Inc. headquarters in San Francisco as CTO. In his current position, he leads the company’s efforts to deliver a cutting-edge Requirements ALM Platform to aid clients in meeting compliance needs and delivering high-quality products on time and within budget.
Have you ever faced any of the above issues in your project? Feel free to offer your experiences with us in the comments section below!!