Category Definition
Characteristics of a World-Class RLA™ Solution
Through visual and collaborative approaches to Requirements Lifecycle Acceleration™ (RLA), it is possible to improve the quality of requirements with an overall goal of reducing risk, and minimizing the negative cost and time-to-market implications of substantial rework during the Software Development Life-Cycle (SDLC). This page provides definitions of a set of Requirements Lifecycle Accelerators which represent the major capabilities needed in a RLA solution in order to solve the root causes of requirements quality: Business Drivers for Requirements Lifecycle Acceleration™
Below is a mapping of each Requirements Lifecycle Accelerator showing their respective magnitude of positive impact on Business and IT performance in terms of improving the quality of systems delivered, reducing rework (cost and time), and minimizing risk.
Requirements Definition Strength
Requirements Definition Strength measures the extent to which all aspects of a requirements specification can be captured in a holistic and comprehensive manner. Today, organizations operate their business with a mixture of formally defined and undocumented processes, legacy systems, new systems, packaged systems, at varying levels of integration. In addition, organizations have evolved their systems architecture through organic development and the integration of systems from acquisitions. Increasingly organizations are moving systems development and maintenance to offshore partners. The risk and complexity of introducing new process and system capabilities has never been higher, and the challenge of defining clear and validated requirements has never been more difficult.
Requirements Quality
As a broad set of requirements are being developed, it is critical to verify the integrity of the
requirements and validate that the requirements meet the business stakeholders’ needs,
which we refer to as Requirements Quality. The degree of quality is a measure of the
“healthiness” of the requirements, which is typically quantified as “unambiguous, complete,
verifiable, consistent, modifiable, traceable, usable” (IEEE Recommended Practices for
Software Requirements Specification Std. 830-1998. 1998). This requires the capability to
integrate, visualize and verify requirements during the authoring process.
Once verified, this capability extends to the validation of requirements by stakeholders in
the languages and formats that fits their unique vocabulary, perspective, and understanding
to ensure comprehension and buy-in, which we refer to as rich simulation and multistakeholder
validation.
Precise Requirements Communication
Once we have defined and validated requirements and achieved stakeholder sign-off, we
measure Precise Requirements Communication as the ability to communicate requirements effectively to key participants in the SDLC including customers,
developers, testers, project managers, and maintenance teams. The measure of preciseness
relates to the ability to transform requirements into simulations, artifacts and documents
that exactly meet the interpretation needs of each constituent participant. This precise
communication can be achieved through extended organizational access to rich simulations
and formal document publishing in standard and customized formats.
Inherent Change Management
Once we have defined and validated high-quality requirements and they have been
communicated to SDLC participants, we inevitably need to manage the process of change
and control of multiple requirements configurations as business needs evolve. We measure
the power of Inherent Change Management by the degree to which change impact, and
traceability is inherent and automatic in the process of analyzing, defining, verifying,
validating and making changes and not a separate manual error prone, remedial process.
Automated Requirements-Driven Testing
Commencing test planning activities as early as possible can bring key benefits. Assessing the testability of requirements provides further insight into requirements
comprehension and quality, and generating tests directly from the requirements improves
overall assurance that the system will be correctly tested to meet the business needs. Automated Requirements-Driven Testing is a measure of the degree to which tests can be
automatically created directly from defined and validated requirements during the
requirement definition process, and automatically regenerated whenever change occurs.
The power of this auto-generation capability is accelerated if different types of tests can be
generated (i.e. system, integration, component, user-acceptance, regression test), and
testing can be tuned to different scope of tests (i.e., full coverage, selected coverage,
impact/change oriented, policy-driven tests). By generating different types and scopes of
tests in an automatic fashion, the economics of test preparation can be changed by reducing
the typical labor intensive manual approach and thereby reducing the associated cost, time,
and risk.
Intelligent Integration with SDLC Tools
In addition to communicating to SDLC participants using simulation and publication, further
efficiency and end-to-end quality can be achieved through Intelligent Integration with SDLC
Tools such as requirements management, design, and test platforms. The measure of
integration is directly related to the ability to transform requirements and tests into artifacts
inside SDLC tools in their native formalized format and with full traceability to the
requirements source.
Seamless Alignment with Process & Practices
In an environment of many standards and practices, formal and informal, it is important for
requirements solutions to align with common approaches/methodologies (Agile
Development, Extreme Development, Rapid Application Development, RUP), architectures
(SOA, Multi-Tiers, Client/Server), practices (CMMI, ISO, Six Sigma, TQM) and SDLC
processes. The measure of Seamless Alignment with Processes & Practices is the degree to
which the requirements solution can support and compliment such practices with minimal
process and people re-alignment and re-training for full adoption, rather than requiring difficult, timely and costly change and re-work to enable adoption. |
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