I recently had the good fortune to collaborate on a webinar discussion on requirements definition and management with Mary Gerush of Forrester Research, a thought leader in requirements management for many years. During the webinar, Mary and I outlined six key tips that organizations needed to follow in order to more quickly deliver higher quality products.
- Exploit the real requirements lifecycle: when looking at improving requirements, you should look at the entire requirements process – from initial request to release into production.
- Define and manage requirements collaboratively: your entire team needs to collaborate and focus on requirements quality – and that doesn’t mean testing.
- Increase your use of pictorial artifacts: you should use pictures to help drive better understanding of requirements.
- Establish a program of requirements reuse: reuse is critical to achieve economy of scale, especially across related products, applications and platforms.
- Take an adaptive, process-driven approach: tools alone won’t help you deliver better requirements – you need to think about people and process too.
- Measure and continuously improve: continuously measure business, project and end user metrics to determine if you’re really delivering quality requirements.
If you’re looking for expert advice on improving the quality of your products through good requirements practices, I highly encourage you to listen to our entire discussion on requirements management.
