New Post 3

Your business can’t thrive today without the ability to deliver software quickly. Unfortunately however, developing software takes time. Business and technology environments have become incredibly complex, and many stakeholders need to provide input. Undocumented legacy applications and technical integrations complicate understanding. And constraints, like those for compliance, security, and performance, keep teams busy making sure they’ve covered all bases.

Companies are constantly looking for ways to accelerate software development. And since requirements can take as much as half a project’s total hours, speeding requirements-related activities has become a high priority for many.

They have to be careful, though, not to increase speed at the expense of quality, because as Forrester wrote in its recent Agile Requirements Vendor Landscape report: “Delivering faster is important, but delivering the right solution faster is what differentiates digital predators from digital prey.”

Requirements reuse speeds requirements without compromising quality.

Many types of requirements, like those for compliance, security, and performance, are common across projects and teams. Predefining them in a shared repository gives requirements authors easy access to those requirements, reducing the time it takes to define them.

Smart leaders also recognize the power of predefining other types of requirements-related content and making it available to Business Analysts and other requirements authors and collaborators. To get the most out of the concept of reuse, they provide their teams with easy access to a wide variety of accurate, validated requirements-related content, like:

• Regulatory information and requirements derived from expert interpretation
• Industry-specific standards and guidance
• Best practice frameworks with predefined planning guides, processes, and checklists
• Standard artifacts and templates for enterprise Agile adoption
• Standard sets of requirements categories and useful elicitation questions

With this information at their fingertips, their teams:

• Get a jumpstart on planning and definition. They can download reusable requirements into their requirements repository. They can readily leverage guides, checklists, and templates. They avoid the delays that often happen when trying to schedule time with busy stakeholders.
• Boost enterprise alignment. Teams across projects define requirements using the same language, and they work together with a shared understanding and common goal. This makes it easier for business stakeholders to review and provide input. It also makes them easier for developers and testers to understand.
• Ensure regulatory compliance. With access to the latest regulatory information and expert interpretations, they know their teams are defining those “must-have” compliance requirements.
• Embed quality up-front. The cost of poor requirements is high. With access to requirements content derived from expert input, validated, and kept up-to-date as they change, organizations are less likely to experience that rework tax.
• Gain knowledge. As teams work with information based on lessons learned and best practices from other projects and Centers of Excellence, they learn, adopting new processes, techniques, and terminology over time through execution.

Implementing a capability to reuse predefined requirements and other requirements-related content takes time, as does keeping the content current. But the benefits are clear: With this practice, requirements take less time to define and manage, and they improve in quality and consistency, ultimately empowering teams to deliver high-quality software that meets business objectives and customer expectations.

Blueprint’s Content Accelerators pave the way for robust requirements content reuse.

Blueprint’s Content Accelerators extend the power of Blueprint’s enterprise-ready software solutions, Blueprint and Storyteller, with predefined, reusable, requirements-related content derived from industry best practices and expert input.

With our innovative, industry-leading Content Accelerators, we give your Business Analysts and other requirements authors easy access to a wealth of valuable information embedded in their requirements tool, including:

• The most current, validated requirements for compliance with many industry regulations, including PCI & 21 CFR Part 11
• Industry standards, checklists, and metrics, like those for FISMA and FedRAMP
• Best practice requirements planning guides, checklists, and templates created by industry experts and Centers of Excellence
• Agile processes, techniques, and terminology for popular Agile approaches embedded in Blueprint, including those for Scrum and Scott Ambler’s Disciplined Agile framework
• Planning structure and content, including a library of non-functional requirements categories and useful elicitation questions documented in Roxanne Miller’s book, The Quest for Software Requirements

Blueprint’s Content Accelerators put valuable requirements information at your Business Analysts’ fingertips in an enterprise-level tool where they can interact with it easily and support it with Blueprint’s robust requirements definition and management capabilities for visualization, traceability, impact analysis, and rapid review. They speed requirements delivery and improve their quality and consistency.

We have dozens of Content Accelerators to meet a wide variety of needs, and our catalog continues to grow. To learn more about how they work and the benefits they deliver, please contact us today.