January 27th, 2010
The Russian writer Ivan Turgenev wrote (in Fathers and Sons in 1862), “A picture shows me at a glance what it takes dozens of pages of a book to expound.”
Text + 
= Complete & Unambiguous Requirements
Traditionally the trend has been to document requirements specifications as bulleted or numbered lists
In time-starved work environments, teams rarely have time to go through the requirements line by line documented in multiple pages. Result – lots of details are intially over looked and then uncovered later in the product development life cycle. This leads to rework and increases the cost of software development.
Some benefits of requirements visualization and simulation are:
- Requirements are easily undernstood
- Users are more engaged in requirements definition process and are more likely to provide feedback
- It is much easier to identify missing requirements and gaps
General argument against requirements visualization is that it is much more work.
Our take – though it might take little longer to create a wireframe or mock up, than to write few paragraphs, you make up for the time spent on visualization by reducing rework related requirements gaps and defects.
We do agree that it might not be practical to visualize all the requirements, however combining visualization with text descriptions can enable better communications and reduce defects related to requirements.
Some of the requirements that can be potential for visualization are:
- User Interface Navigation Flow Diagram or Story boards to capture flow. This can enable you to model the high-level relationships between major user interface elements and thereby ask fundamental questions.
- User interface (UI) prototyping. This requirement artifact can help in high-level requirements envisioning early in the project to help team come to a common understanding as to the scope of what you’re trying to accomplish. Plus tools like Clariys can help you associate business rules, constraints etc. with individual UI elements such as buttons, hyperlinks
What do you think are the other requirements type that work better when visualized?
Posted in Admin's Desk | 1 Comment »
November 18th, 2009
This article gives an overview of benefits from a requirements management tool, and features to consider when evaluating requirements management tools.
Reasons to Use Requirements Management Tools over traditional Word, Spreadsheets and Wikis
Some of the benefits of using requirements management tools are:
- Complete linking and traceability across artifacts. A good requirements tool provides ability to analyze impact of a change to all the associated artifacts
- Clickable and Interactive User Interface prototyping. While you can create static wireframes with traditional diagramming tool, a requirements management tool with prototyping and simulation feature can help you capture and communicate requirements effectively.
- Baseline/freeze requirements anytime and compare versions side by side.
- Robust reporting features can help track current project/release/iteration status, plus reporting feature can help users quickly customize the key metrics they want to track to maintain a continuous up-to-date view
- Manage change or new feature requests and keep audit track of changes to the requirements artifacts
Features to consider while evaluating Requirements Management Software
- Adaptability & Customizable: tool should be adaptable to fit your processes such as iterative, waterfall or hybrid. If your organization like most of the organizations follows multiple methodologies depending on the type project, look for a tool that supports waterfall as well as agile methodologies.
- End-to-end requirements traceability: requirements tools should let you link software requirements to all the artifacts. Look for tools that provide bi-directional and one-to-many linking.
- End-to-end impact analysis: a good requirements management should quickly help users to understand impact of a specific change on other requirements and other artifacts.
- Ease of Use: the tool should be easy to use and intuitive. Traditionally users have been using word processors and spreadsheets to manage requirements, if the requirements management tools are complex and need lot of training, users are likely to avoid them
- Requirements Visualization: helps facilitate better communications and understanding of the requirements. Prototyping and Visualization features can help you communicate thousand words in a single picture
We welcome your thoughts, do tell us what you think.
Posted in Requirements Management | No Comments »
September 22nd, 2009
Organizations using the traditional requirements management tools find that projects and products are still not meeting the customer needs. The reason?
Current requirements tools focus on organizing, managing and tracing the requirements. For the product to meet customer needs organizations need a tool to elicit, validate and visualize requirements while collaborating with stakeholders. Traditional enterprise (such as DOORS, CaliberRM etc) and new generation requirement management tools (such as Jama Contour, Gatherspace) lack this capability.
Clariys combines traditional requirements management capabilities with a powerful prototyping tool that helps teams to validate and collaborate before product is built.
By modeling the user interface in the requirements phase, the design and development team knows exactly what the user wants because it was validated with a simulated version. This helps organizations to improve time to market and reduce rework.
Some benefits of unified solution:
- No syncing, importing or exporting of visual artifacts or requirements, as both are created in one product.
- Complete integration of all artifacts, enabling you to associate requirements to User Interface screen and other visual artifacts ensuring end-to-end visibility and traceability for all requirement artifacts.
Posted in Clariys Product | No Comments »