Several large companies and government agencies said that in recent months they have bought or built tools to automate paper-based or verbal requirements-definition methods. Some businesses are also planning to integrate the requirements management process with the rest of the application development life cycle to improve communication between users and developers.
The urgency to improve requirements management processes has prompted some companies to create new positions within IT departments to oversee such efforts.
For example, about six months ago, Ed Barkley was named to the new post of proc-ess improvement leader in the IT shop of a large health care company he asked not be named.
Barkley's new role: to implement changes that increase end-user satisfaction with new applications developed in-house. His first order of business: to overhaul the development operation's requirements management process.
"In many cases, we are not delivering to the customers what they wanted," said Barkley, noting that developers often wrongly assume that they understand the needs of their users.
"You see how the current requirements are being developed, [and] you discover that the requirements aren't being understood or documented correctly, if at all," by IT developers, said Barkley, who also heads the Kansas City Rational Users Group. "That is the beginning of the problem. [IT] people assume what the customer wants."
Turning to templates
To help bolster the process at the health care company, IT developers created requirements management templates to provide users with a formal process for listing what they need in new applications.
The company began using the templates this month, Barkley said.
The company hopes use of the templates can first halt the practice of users passing their needs on to developers either verbally or in notes with "large paragraphs of rambling," according to Barkley. The new process also calls for users to approve work on an application at multiple stages of development, he added.
Once the system is in place for an undetermined period, Barkley said, IT will start auditing the process to determine whether user needs are being met and whether users are satisfied with the resulting applications.
If the audit determines that the new process is accepted by users and developers, Barkley said, the health care firm plans to link the templates to IBM Rational's RequisitePro requirements management tool, which it has used intermittently in the past, Barkley said. After that, the company will link the integrated requirements management process with the Rational testing tools it uses, he said.
Brian Kilcourse, chief strategist at Retail Systems Alert Group, a Newton, Mass.-based IT research firm, said the inability to meet user needs at many large companies has offset recent major advances in software development technologies -- such as integrated development environments and ever-improving code-generation tools.
"We've been in commercial computing for almost 50 years, and we've automated all kinds of tasks," Kilcourse said. "But requirements management is the one thing we haven't gotten to in any meaningful way."
Kilcourse contended that a lack of communication between users and developers is the primary reason for the problem. "IT people don't sit around designing things nobody wants because they are dumb or they are focused on malfeasance," he said.
Indeed, Carey Schwaber, an analyst at Forrester Research Inc. in Cambridge, Mass., maintains that developer misunderstandings of user requirements are the leading cause of defects in software. Compounding the problem, she added, is the emergence of globally distributed development and government regulations, like the Sarbanes-Oxley Act in the U.S., that require users to prove that their IT systems meet business requirements.
The Internal Revenue Service has been plagued with requirements management problems since it began to replace its tax administration and financial systems seven years ago, according to a report by the Government Accountability Office.
According to the report, released in March, cost overruns and delays have plagued the $1.9 billion IRS project. The report blamed inadequate development and management of requirements, among other things.
As the problems mounted early on in the project, the IRS in October 2004 created the Requirements Management Office. However, the office doesn't expect to have final requirements management policies and procedures in place until March 2007, the report said.
No more mind reading
Debra Jensen, vice president of system development at Jack in the Box Inc. in San Diego, said the restaurant chain is currently evaluating requirements management tools as part of an initiative to overhaul the process of collecting requirements from users.
That effort began about a year ago, when the company started using internally built templates to collect user requirements. The process now demands that users formally certify that finished applications meet their needs.
The Jack in the Box IT requirements management overhaul was initiated because in the past, "there [was] a sense that IT should just know the business needs and write the requirements for [users]," Jensen said.
The need to comply with the Sarbanes-Oxley Act has been used by IT to further persuade users to embrace the templates. "We said the auditors were going to be looking for these requirements in writing," Jensen said.
With the first phase of the new process in place and accepted by users, Jensen said, Jack in the Box's IT department is starting to work under the philosophy that if business users don't have time to define requirements, "we don't have the time to implement them."
Further down the line, Jensen said, the company plans to buy a business process engineering tool that will be integrated with the requirements management product it chooses. Such an integration promises to create a system that can automatically capture the various requirements associated with specific business processes, such as order proc-essing, she added.
The Workplace Safety and Insurance Board in Toronto, which manages Ontario's workplace safety initiatives and provides disability benefits, recently purchased IBM Rational's Portfolio Manager tool to better align the requirements management process with the rest of the development life cycle.
Vitalie Temnenco, an architect in the organization, said the board plans to integrate the Rational tool with the SteelTrace Catalyze requirements management tool from Detroit-based Compuware Corp., which the agency already uses. IT developers will use a Catalyze adapter to integrate the tools.
Temnenco wouldn't speculate on when the integration project will start but did note that the board is planning to train its developers, business architects and requirements analysts to use the integrated tool set.
"If we feed all the requirements information into the portfolio management tool, we'll be able to provide for a quick turnaround of project data," he said. "Ideally, we would reach a new real-time process."
Clearer communication
New York-based OgilvyOne North America, the direct marketing arm of advertising company Ogilvy Group, plans to acquire an enterprise license for the Catalyze tool before the end of this year, said Jonathan Karpoff, senior partner and director of information architecture at New York-based OgilvyOne.
The company currently has three individual licenses for the software, he said. The number of developers using the tool will at least triple with the new license, he noted.
At the same time, Karpoff said OgilvyOne may soon integrate the Catalyze tool with Rational development, testing and quality assurance tools it is evaluating for purchase. Such an integrated system could dramatically lessen the number of communication mix-ups that routinely occur during telephone conversations between groups of users and development teams, he said.
The company has used Catalyze for the past year and a half to gather and manage requirements for the Web sites it builds for external clients. "It allows us to identify issues, conflicts, things that we and the stakeholders had not thought about previously," Karpoff said.
The Requirements Management Business Analysis Center of Competency in the Bank of Montreal has completed implementation of a requirements management process and now plans to start an effort to expand it to help the bank reuse user prerequisites, said Kathleen Barret, consulting manager at the center.
Barret said talk of reuse only became serious after users accepted a formal requirements management process. "The business people really bought into the requirements process," she said. "They are no longer saying, 'Why do I need to do this?' "
The latest effort will begin later this year with the launch of several workshops to train the bank's business analysts and developers on the need to document the requirements for certain business processes -- like retrieving a customer profile -- so that they can be reused, she said.
Barret noted that applications could have varying requirements for the same business process, and with 800 applications in production, reusing requirements could generate substantial savings.
"We need to articulate what is involved on a step-by-step basis in retrieving a customer profile [and] identify what will be automated and capture it in requirements," Barret said.
The bank has been focusing on streamlining requirements management since 2003, when it identified the process as being the weakest in the IT shop, she said. The effort began in earnest in late 2004 with the installation of a requirements management tool from Telelogic AB.