ThoughtWorks Briefing - Requirements Gathering June 21, 2007

Requirements Management in a fast-moving world

“Analysts report that as many as 71 percent of software projects that fail do so because of poor requirements management, making it the biggest reason for project failure.” CIO Magazine

It’s a fast-moving world. Even rigorous requirements management frequently fails to lead to the desired or intended results. Common problems include:
- Assuming you know what you want from the start: often the business users’ understanding of the desired solution evolves significantly over the course of that solution’s creation. It’s a false assumption that you can adequately explain (or even conceive of) everything you want up front;
- Lack of actual shared understanding: great solutions evolve through the timely contribution of, and feedback from, the right stakeholders. Time and again project teams fail to communicate their understanding of the solution with key stakeholders, or even among themselves;
- Lack of Testability: How does the implementation team know when they’re done? All too often acceptance criteria are frequently ill-defined or not defined at all;
- Resistance to Change: when overly onerous (and frequently adversarial) “change request” processes inhibit business flexibility and,
- Excessive Documentation: which conceals a lack of actual clarity and common business/IT understanding.

In recent years, ThoughtWorks has focused attention on applying agile techniques to effectively manage the requirements process. In this seminar, we will illustrate highly visual, “lean”, testable and iterative techniques to improve requirements practices.

Speaker: Luke Barrett, Senior Business Analyst at ThoughtWorks

Official Website: http://www.thoughtworks.co.uk/tech-briefing.html