The focus of this article is managing requirements, one of the most challenging areas of application development, and our feature is an interview with a true guru of requirements management, Rob Beckmann, who advises our clients on best practices in this area and explains why it takes more than a series of client meetings to design useful applications.

Interview with Rob Beckmann,
Principal, Requirements Management Practice

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By James Houston

Q: Rob, we are all aware how important requirements are in application development. Why then, are almost half of project failures still requirements-based?

A: That's a good question. For me it's crucial to think in terms of both requirements gathering and requirements management. That is, you need good people and techniques to capture requirements as accurately as possible, and an on-going process which recognizes that requirements will change over the life of the project. It sounds simple, but the plain truth is that most organizations don't have the experience or the resources to do that as effectively as they'd like to and I think that is why we see such a high failure rate attributed to requirements. Everything is driven by requirements, and if they are incomplete or not managed well, the application will fail.

Q: There are a lot of well-established techniques for requirements gathering - what works best in your experience?

A: This may surprise people, but simply meeting with the client isn't enough. Talking to the various stakeholders, the user groups, stakeholder representatives, business analysts, and so on is essential, but it isn't going to give you a complete picture. There has to be secondary research. Caro will typically look at a number of other sources as part of our requirements gathering process: prior attempts to model the business processes, legacy data stores and database schemas, prior project artifacts, legislative documents, and so on, to help us better understand the requirements. This background information gives us the insights to ask the right questions when we do talk to various project stakeholders. It's all about knowing where to look and it takes an experienced team to bring that thoroughness to the requirements gathering process. It is worth the effort though - as we all know, it's a lot better to understand your requirements as early as possible than to have them turn up later on in the development cycle.

Q. Is poor requirements gathering the biggest contributor to requirements-based failure?

A: The up front work makes a big difference to the success or failure of the project but it's equally important that you manage the requirements throughout the development cycle. Even when you have gathered what you feel is a thorough set of requirements and have tested them for completeness, you have to expect that the requirements will change. People make mistakes in expressing and understanding requirements, and will rarely (if ever!) know all their requirements up front. Additionally, over a long development cycle, you could be looking at requirements changes as a result of changes in business objectives, competitive pressures or from legislative influences. The key is to anticipate that change will occur, and to manage change throughout the development process, establishing priorities for how you handle them during the build.

Q. What in your opinion are the biggest challenges in requirements management?

A: One of them is a people thing. For successful requirements management, the various players need to be involved in ways they might not have been traditionally, and you need a team that can help make that happen. For example, representatives of the business side need to be involved throughout the project to ensure requirements are faithfully carried through to implementation, and to participate in the re-prioritization and scope setting of project deliverables. Under traditional approaches the business sponsors were led to believe they could throw their requirements over a fence and come back in six months to a successful working system. It just doesn't work that way. Ideally, you need to show the business representatives what is happening early on and frequently by demonstrating working prototypes of the system. By illustrating tangible results early in the project there is an opportunity to elicit early and continuous feedback to ensure the project is on the right path.

Q. So you're saying that requirements management is best accomplished through an iterative development approach?

A: Absolutely, yes. We find that the traditional "waterfall" method and mindset just doesn't provide the flexibility and responsiveness needed for good requirements management. We've had great success managing application development with the iterative approach of the Rational Unified Process (RUP) methodology. The value of using RUP is that it requires communication across the development lifecycle. You involve the business during each iteration, and the focus is on early feedback from the stakeholders so you know you are hitting the mark. So you learn from the development and use of the system as you go while ensuring the continuity of development.

Q. Given that requirements gathering is the downfall of so many projects, what can an organization do about it?

A: Requirements management will always be a challenge for application developers. Regardless of the development methodology used, developers need to pay attention to requirements throughout. In part, that requires a different mindset and also a different level of involvement between the various team members and stakeholders. Caro's approach to managing application development involves a lot of education of the players involved, especially where they are acting in non-traditional roles or taking a non-traditional approach. From the requirements gathering standpoint, we also offer courses on requirements management best practices that help you get the most out of techniques like use cases. In addition to education, we believe that the introduction and execution of any process will be far more successful when lead by highly skilled practitioners. To start on the road to improved return on your software investments, start with an intense focus on requirements management. Investing in good requirements management is the most reliable investment a business can make.