A Requirements Management Myth Busted at Rational Software Conference
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.
Well it's time I headed off for breakfast and into the last morning keynote and track sessions. More from me tomorrow.
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DOORS is a good product
The problem that DOORS solves is an important one. How do you keep from dropping or losing any requirements as you transition the project through multiple iterations? We do Requirements Management very similar to DOORS in Code Roller except that we also track requirements as they transition through the phases in each iteration. With Code Roller, you can easily find out what part of a use case analyzes each requirement. You can also determine what parts of a design implement each part of the use cases. Similar tracking happens between test plans and use cases and between defects and test steps.
Software development is like a little factory that generates decisions all day long. Over time, a lot of decisions get made in the making of software, some big and some small. How do you access the justification that went into any single decision? Products like DOORS and Code Roller help answer that question.