Well it's the final day today of the Rational Software Conference / Telelogic User Group Conference in cloudy Orlando today. What a great day of keynote and session tracks here yesterday. Although the keynote featuring Watson and the Mythbusters was very entertaining, highlight of the day for me was hearing a requirements  management myth busted that IBM Rational (formerly Telelogic) DOORS is only for large engineering teams building battleships.

An IBM customer has deployed DOORS in a small software development team (less than 20 people) developing a web application that uses the Electronic Medical Record to provide patient data analytics vital to the treatment and care of medical patients.

Before putting in place an improved requirements management process, the team were surviving on a hero culture, but often didn't completely satisfy stakeholder expectations and they didn't have the ability to estimate software delivery times and had loose project schedules. After taking steps to capture and structure requirements in DOORS, and review with development and QA stakeholders using DOORS Web Access (web browser access to the requirements database), estimation and understanding of what can be delivered in a timeframe has improved, similar functionality has been delivered in 25% of the calendar time, and they've seen a 69% net reduction in the cost of test preparation, testing, and rework, with the most dramatic improvements in reduced rework because of better management of what is to be delivered. And not only that but also team morale has improved because of the satisfaction of delivering higher quality work.

On day 2 of the main conference sessions at the Rational Software Conference / Telelogic User Group Conference, I heard many different ways in which requirements management practices are expanding in their strategic impact, not only in  software development but also on complex systems and 'systems of systems' projects.

A large government defence agency is taking their use of RM beyond the project level to use it for 'Capability Management' - assessing the strategic requirements for defence of the nation, identifying current gaps and proposing / evaluating alternative solutions for plugging those gaps. The central administration for the requirements tools and processes at this agency are also helping the users to achieve a much more personal goal of 'more golf time' by providing tools and processes to help them become more efficient.

I'm at the Rational Software Conference in Orlando this week and there's a substantial community interested in requirements definition and management / requirements engineering topics. It's a really interesting mix of people this year because the Telelogic User Group Conference is co-located here and that means we have IT Business Analysts working on enterprise IT applications from industries like financial services and retail, and Systems Engineers working on systems and product development projects in aerospace & defense, medical devices and automotive. It's interesting to hear that there are some common perspectives on requirements but also it's clear that there are also some significantly different drivers in each of the industries and projects that these roles are working on, leading them to take different approaches to, and needing different tool support for their requirements management process.