The requirements factory

I was speaking to some offshore development managers last week, where we were discussing what a challenge it is to get good requirements. This is not a new phenomenon, it has just gotten so much harder with increasing levels of technical complexity and the cultural and distance diversity of our current development landscape.

The May 1995 issue of Communications of the ACM included several articles about requirements for software products. One of them involves how Digital Equipment Corp redesigned their requirements process. Their challenges and learnings are still relevant today.

They first described a fairly traditional nine-step process that one might find at any major software development organization. It isn't "waterfall" since many of the steps overlap. Nonetheless they mention that many product development personnel expect that creative, knowledge-driven processes are similar in execution to deterministic, manufacturing style processes, and that it was that view that was correlated to dissatisfaction with the requirements management process.

[they] expected the process to do the creative work of contextualized data collection, interpretive data analysis and responsive design

The teams that were more successful allowed themselves more flexibility on the process. In other words they adjusted the process to the problem. This supports the idea that a process should not be over-prescribed; the team needs the ability to be creative not only in how to implement the solution, but in how to figure out what the solution is.

Then they did something very innovative and interesting. They incorporated creation of marketing deliverables into the requirements management process. Specifically the marketing and advertising messages, user information, pricing and competitive positioning and sales and support information. I haven't worked or consulted anywhere where that was done up front, but it strikes me as a brilliant way to engage the cross functional teams to work through the entire problem set and ensure that they understand all aspects of what the proposed product is and needs to do. It provides the right framework to help answer the questions which will inevitably need to be solved, and gets them resolved earlier. The result is lower requirements churn.

The challenge for most organizations is going to be the change in behavior required to get the marketing department to work in a fundamentally different way. That means you'll need a compelling vision or a painful execution failure, and support from the top.