Tools and Automation for the Software Development Lifecycle
10 July 2008
In this issue:
- A Word with the Wise:
The Requirements of Requirements Tools with Doug Akers
- What's Happening at StickyMinds.com
- Featured Tool: MKS Integrity for Requirements Management
- Outside the Toolbox: WiFi Detector Shirt
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ADVERTISEMENT:
Independent Evaluation of Requirements Management Solutions
MKS has earned the highest score for current offering in
Forrester's evaluation of the requirements management market.
MKS Integrity achieved top scores in the categories of
requirements analysis, reporting, security and solution
architecture, and is noted as having "superior support for
requirements reuse." Get the report, courtesy of MKS:
http://www.mks.com/toolsjuly-rm-evaluation
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A Word with the Wise:
The Requirements of Requirements Tools with Doug Akers
by Joey McAllister
Doug Akers leads the Product Management group at MKS Inc., where
he is responsible for requirements management and other aspects
of application lifecycle management platform MKS Integrity. For
the past five years Doug has worked directly in the field of
application lifecycle management.
Joey McAllister: What are some of the requirements management
tools that you use?
Doug Akers: Actually, I almost exclusively use the requirements
capabilities within our own product, MKS Integrity, for
capturing and managing requirements in my position here at MKS.
JM: How do those capabilities make you more productive or
efficient?
DA: This solution allows me to quickly capture the content I
gather from customers, the market, or many of the other sources
that product managers tap to formulate into requirements. I can
relate these requirements to other artifacts within the system--
whether they are designs, tests, or customer requests for
change--and track their evolution through a process. These
relationships also help automating my communication with R&D so
that if a requirement should change, the downstream artifacts
are notified of that change and can react in a timely and
appropriate manner. The built-in change management functionality
also enables me to know that only vetted and approved changes
get into a project--there are no surprises that would generally
lead to schedule and cost overruns.
JM: How did you first decide to incorporate the requirements
capabilities into your work? Have you introduced your tool-using
methods to other people?
DA: Much of my use of the tool grew out of working closely with
customers who had similar challenges. They drove us to
incorporate requirements capabilities into the MKS Integrity
platform to solve specific business problems they were facing
that stemmed from poor or no traceability right down to the
source code level, no change management practices, no ability to
reuse requirements across projects, and no way to control the
evolution of a requirement or requirements document through
process and workflow. I think we’ve been very successful in
introducing the capabilities of the platform to others--it is
resonating very well, particularly with embedded systems
organizations where reuse is a huge productivity boost. They’ve
been reusing code for years, but the ability to reuse strategic
business objects--i.e., from requirements right through to
code-–is really giving these types of organizations a
competitive edge in their markets.
JM: You mentioned relating requirements to other system
artifacts and how that helps to automate communication with R&D.
Tell us more about how requirements tools help to open up the
lines of communication between different elements of an
organization, as well as between the organization and its
customers. How do they keep everyone on the same page?
DA: In the software engineering world the requirements are the
contract between the user and the developers. Change to
requirements--be it from the users or from the developers--
without management and notification of that change will result
in a mismatch between expectation and delivery. Other industries
are no different in this respect. When I order a granite kitchen
countertop and walk in to a completed kitchen with a laminate
countertop, I am not going to be happy. Had I been notified that
the supplier was out of granite and been given the opportunity
to make another selection, rather than the cabinet maker simply
using what was on hand, we’d have a much better end result. I
need timely notification of a change to the original contract.
Requirements management tools go part way to solving this
communication gap. They allow for the capture of the initial
requirements, and they allow for a framework for accepting and
performing change to those requirements-–again though, only
part of the solution. Requirements tools cannot exist in a silo
or vacuum but rather must be connected to the rest of the
development lifecycle. The tools that are part of a single ALM
platform, ideally, or those that are part of an integrated set
of ALM components, minimally, will provide the most benefit.
When you can connect a requirement to a design or line of code
you have the ability to tell if either changes through the
course of normal work and automatically notify the business
analyst or developer that that change was injected into the
system and needs to be accounted for. The ALM platform and these
connections between requirements and other project artifacts
play the role of general contractor, keep all the trades in
check in terms of schedule and deliverables, and ensure that
when change gets in, the right people at the right time are
notified. In the single ALM platform solution, many of these
connections are automated, and hence the benefits are
immediately realized.
JM: Tracking requirements can be as simple as keeping a list on
an office whiteboard, but the world is seldom so simple these
days. How does requirements management software assist, for
instance, teams located remotely from each other? What sort of
needs or challenges do you see for requirements tools in the
future?
DA: I am not sure the future is so far off, and I am also not
sure that any of the first-generation requirements tools
available today address any of these challenges well if at all.
We are seeing many of these issues in many organizations today,
and the lack of collaboration capabilities within many legacy
requirements management tools--or, more broadly, the class of
integrated tools making up an ALM solution--is hurting many
organizations and their ability to roll out innovation.
Requirements management software is playing catch up in terms of
the concepts that software change and configuration management
software has already implemented to solve the collaboration
issues. For example, you need a central repository to start with
so that everyone is working from the same base. Once you have
that, you need to provide access to it from all over the world--
ideally under a federated server architecture rather than
replication and all the issues surrounding that model. Now that
your repository is available and accessible you need enable
multiple groups to author and consume requirements in parallel,
this means versioning, branching, sharing, and reusing these
artifacts as well as conflict detection and resolution that is
built right into the system. Change management and automated
notification come into play here as well, and of course your
requirements management environment is already enabling you to
author and trace requirements and requirements documents to each
other and to other artifacts in the lifecycle like test plans,
design documents, defects, and project records.
You are absolutely right, no longer simple this business of
ours. It is a complex world and it is a world we live in today.
Are you using requirements management tools in your
organization? What products are you using, and how do they
affect your work? Email me at jmcallister@sqe.com to keep
the conversation going!
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Media Spotlight:
Gray Matters Podcast: Linda Rising
In this episode of Gray Matters, Joey McAllister chats with
Linda Rising at the 2008 Better Software Conference & EXPO about
deception. Do we deceive ourselves and others about estimation?
Do we have a choice? http://www.stickyminds.com/podcasts#GM0608
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What's Happening at StickyMinds.com
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Featured Tool: MKS Integrity for Requirements Management
Vendor: MKS Inc.
Address: 410 Albert Street
Waterloo, Ontario,
Canada N2L 3V3
Phone: 800.613.7535 or 519.884.2251
Fax: 519.884.8861
Tool URL: http://www.mks.com/products/requirements
Description: MKS Integrity for Requirements Management enables
engineering and IT organizations to address the primary causes
of software project failures. With its unique change and
configuration management approach, built on the foundation of a
single ALM platform, MKS Integrity enables organizations to
capture and validate software requirements, link them to
downstream development and testing activities and to manage
their completion through a unified process across the lifecycle.
Unlike other requirements management solutions, MKS Integrity
goes beyond traditional authoring and traceability providing
requirements change management and new capabilities for
requirements reuse which enables the business to improve
agility, visibility and to minimize software project risk.
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Outside the Toolbox: WiFi Detector Shirt
Whether you're in a coffee shop, an airport, or a coffee shop in
an airport, chances are good that you'll either ask or hear
someone else ask the modern equivalent to Where's the beef?:
Do you have WiFi?
But now you can let not only yourself know when there's a good,
wireless Internet connection nearby, but also everyone around
you. Much like the wireless signal detector on your computer,
the WiFi Detector Shirt has bars that light up to tell you how
strong the nearest signal is.
So, you might want to wear a coat to the movies if your theater
is surrounded by Starbucks locations.
Learn more about the WiFi Detector Shirt at
http://www.stickyminds.com/WiFiDetectorShirt.
Know of any fun or unusual tools, toys, or other items that
might be slightly outside the software development toolbox? Tell
me about them by sending an email to jmcallister@sqe.com.
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