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Thursday, June 10, 2004
Toral: Managing requirements
By Janette Toral
Digital Filipino
FAILURE. A lot of software development projects by organizations, whether large or small, fail, because of poor requirements management.
Here is a checklist you can follow should you decide to start outsourcing or developing your
in-house applications.
l Get trained. Understanding how the software development life cycle takes place will make you sensitive to the realities of this process. Untrained project proponents often have unrealistic expectations and are primary causes of project failures.
Getting software process improvement knowledge beforehand will make you confident as well in dealing with vendors and able to discern which entity can deliver the expectations in your software project based on their competency and process maturity.
l Document your requirements. Make sure all requirements stated in your software project are documented.
Before the creation of a project plan, three documents must be prepared and approved: the vision/scope, customer requirements, and product requirements.
These documents shall serve as the basis for project planning, testing, and customer acceptance.
l Identify your success criteria. Each feature or component of your requirements was included for a reason.
Its reason must be cited, and the goals or success criteria must be stated. This is the only way you can measure whether you have met your objectives.
Success criteria can be a business statement like “decrease the number of days for order processing from five to three days” to a technical statement like “complete monthly sales report generation in 30 minutes.”
l Assign responsibility to stakeholders. Most projects fail due to the lack of or poor participation of stakeholders.
All identified actors in the project must be given appropriate responsibility. They should be made responsible for non-cooperation in the software development project.
One factor that results in this poor cooperation is the lack of knowledge about the software development life cycle.
That is why it is important to have a workshop at the start of the project to level the knowledge among project participants and relevant stakeholders.
(e-mail: janette@digitalfilipino.com.)
(June 10, 2004 issue)
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