Requirements management, Enterprise Architect and Expert-IT

We all know the statistics: IDC research indicates that 70 - 80% of IT projects that fail do so because of poor requirements Management, gathering and analysis.

WHY is it so hard to get requirements right?

The management of requirements has traditionally been one of the more difficult and problematic disciplines in the software development industry. There are a number of reasons for this, but perhaps the most significant are the following:

• Diverse group input into the requirements
• Organizational boundary divisions
• Tool boundary divisions
• Volatility of requirements
• Imprecision and ambiguities of natural languages
• Lack of strategy and tools
• Usual situations of requirements management : duplication, no traceability, spontaneous generation, requirements are elicitated but not feasible, impact of change is missing, ….

Take this example, for instance: Your company has 4,000 different feature requests for one product. You keep those feature requests in approximately 55 Microsoft Excel spreadsheets. Some features are difficult. Some take more work than others. Some could take a year to complete. Customers call every morning to see if you’re going to include their particular requirements. What do you do?

Starting from these facts, we need to minimize the gap between business and IT and deliver value by better aligning development, testing and deployment with their business objectives.

The main activities to achieve those objectives are:

• Capture and structure of business requirements
• Collaboration and communication of requirements across the team
• Full traceability across the project life cycle
• Establishment of common shared understanding of requirements
• Automatic generation of comprehensive up-to-date documentation
• Creation of Test requirements
• And more…

Those activities must be integrated and organized by formalizing a process.

"Requirements engineering and management process" is composed by:

• Requirements Definition, the part of the process of eliciting, documenting, analyzing, validating and agreeing requirements.
• Requirements Management, the part of the process of prioritizing and structuring requirements and then controlling change and communicating to relevant actors of the project. It is a continuous process throughout the project.

Gathering and managing requirements are important challenges in project management. Projects succeed or fail due to poor requirements at any time throughout the project lifecycle. The continuously evolving baseline of requirements needs to be managed effectively.

Expert-IT provides professional services to define and manage business and software requirements.
Expert-IT Consultants use practical and proven methods that rapidly and effectively deliver business value.

A Requirements Management Consultant from Expert-IT can also work with your project team using in-house or industry standard Requirements Management, Application Lifecycle Management and Visual Modeling tools to manage and administer the requirements and change process through design, testing and development. We use best practices and the leading tools to ensure your software and systems are delivered to meet your business requirements.

Expert-IT is a value added reseller and training partner of Sparx Systems, editor of Enterprise Architect. Enterprise Architect is a comprehensive UML analysis and design tool, covering software development from requirements gathering, through to the analysis stages, design models, testing and maintenance.

The UML and Enterprise Architect can be used to reduce (and in many circumstances remove) these problems by supporting the requirements engineering and management process.

Enterprise Architect (EA) is one of the few UML tools that integrate requirements management with other software development disciplines, by creating requirements directly in the model. Requirements management is built into the core product, solving many of the issues of traceability, interdisciplinary team divisions, integration with change and configuration management systems.

Some of the features include:

• The ability to create and view requirements directly in the model.
• The ability to detail use cases directly in the model.
• The ability to enter attributes for each requirement such as difficulty, status, and type; you can also define your own attributes.
• The ability to trace requirements to business rules, test cases and analysis artifacts.
• A Relationship Matrix for traceability and viewing the impact of changes to requirements.
• The ability to create customer quality MS Word and HTML documentation.

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