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Mini-Tutorials/Meet
the Expert
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Mini-Tutorial
1:
Just Enough Requirements Management
Al Davis (University of Colorado at Colorado
Springs, USA)
Wednesday, September 13, 10:45
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Abstract:
After 25 years of consulting, researching, and
training in the area of requirements management, I
have finally come to understand that requirements
management needs to be made simpler, not more
complex. And in today's competitive world we need
to find ways to accelerate system development
dramatically; modern requirements management must
thus reduce, not extend, the effort.
In today's practice, some companies have tended
toward over-methodization, while others have tended
toward under-methodization. The result is that
requirements are either over-analyzed and
over-specified, or are totally ignored. This
common-sense tutorial addresses the "right" level
at which requirements should be addressed, with
emphasis on recognizing that the "right" level is
different for every project.
The talk will cover all three major areas of
requirements management: elicitation, triage, and
specification. Each will be described, its goals
will be made clear, common practices will be
described, and recommendations for doing it in a
"just enough" manner will be explored. Of course,
what is "just enough" for an Atari game vs. a
nuclear reactor control system is quite different,
so the tutorial will also discuss the factors that
would cause you to want to alter the "just enough"
prescription for your own needs.
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About the
speaker: Al Davis is a professor in the College
of Business at the University of Colorado at
Colorado Springs. He has spent roughly half of his
career in industry and half in academe.
On the industrial side, he has been CEO (of
Omni-Vista), Vice President of Engineering Services
(at BTG), Director of R&D; (at GTE Communication
Systems), member of the board of directors of
Requisite, Inc., and a consultant for many
corporations, including Boeing, Cigna, Federal
Express, Fujitsu, Great Plains Software, IBM,
Mitsubishi Electric, Rational Software, Rockwell,
Samsung, Software Productivity Consortium, Storage
Tek, and XAware.
On the academic side, he has been at George Mason
University, University of Tennessee, University of
the Western Cape, South Africa, University of Jos,
Nigeria, University of Technology, Sydney,
Australia, and the Technical University of Madrid,
Spain.
He is the author of 4 books: Software
Requirements: Objects, Functions and States
(Prentice Hall), 201 Principles of Software
Development (McGraw Hill), Great Software
Debates (Wiley) and Just Enough Requirements
Management (Dorset House) and 100+ articles in
journals, conferences and trade press. He has
lectured 500+ times in over 25 countries. He earned
his Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University
of Illinois in 1975.
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Mini-Tutorial
2:
Requirements by Collaboration: Facilitating
Workshops to Define Stakeholder Needs
Ellen Gottesdiener (EBG Consulting, USA)
Friday, September 15, 10:45
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Abstract:
Well-designed and well-facilitated requirements
workshops are one of the best ways to overcome the
myriad of problems that arise from inadequate
stakeholder involvement and ambiguous requirements.
This experience-based tutorial will share a set of
effective, time-tested practices for planning,
designing, and facilitating requirements
workshops. Are your architects, developers,
and testers working overtime in the final phases of
coding and testing to meet software requirements
they should have known about weeks or months ago?
Are you continually going back to stakeholders to
revise and clarify their needs, resulting in
confusion and rework? There is a better way -
requirements workshops.
Requirements workshops are a proven good practice
we have known about for decades. They are regaining
popularity because of the growing interest in agile
software development, which emphasizes human
interaction and customer collaboration. Like Joint
Application Design (JAD), these workshops are not
traditional meetings or informal one-on-one
discussions. Instead, they are focused, highly
productive events attended by carefully selected
stakeholders and content experts and led by a
neutral facilitator. Well-run workshops promote
trust, mutual understanding, and strong
communications among project stakeholders. They
produce deliverables that structure and guide
development.
In this tutorial, you'll learn how workshops differ
from meetings, and you'll study a reusable
structure for designing workshops. You'll get tips
and good practices gleaned from numerous successful
industry workshops, and you'll discover the
importance of selecting the right analysis models
for your problem domain.
Familiarity with basic facilitation skills and
practices as well as with a variety of requirements
analysis models (e.g., use cases, stories,
scenarios, business rules, actors, state diagrams,
data models, etc.) is desirable but not
required.
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About the
speaker: Ellen Gottesdiener, Principal
Consultant, EBG Consulting, helps teams
collaboratively explore requirements, shape their
development processes, and plan their work. Ellen's
experiences as a requirements facilitator are
articulated in her book Requirements by
Collaboration: Workshops for Defining Needs
(Addison-Wesley, 2002). Her latest book is
Software Requirements Memory Jogger: A Pocket
Guide to Help Software and Business Teams Develop
and Manage Requirements (GOAL/QPC, 2005).
Ellen has extensive experience working with
business and software teams to successfully start
up projects, define product requirements, and
improve teamwork. Her industry career includes
being a developer, analyst, trainer, project
manager, and process leader. She presents seminars
on requirements, facilitated workshops,
retrospectives, and software inspections and peer
reviews. She is a conference speaker and advisor
for the Software Development conferences and the
stickyminds.com Web site. She has authored numerous
papers on software requirements, methods, and
modeling, and she is a Certified Professional
Facilitator (CPF).
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Meet the
Expert:
Requirement Engineering, an Oxymoron?
Ivy Hooks (Compliance Automation, Inc.,
USA)
Thursday, September 14, 14:00
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Abstract:
Requirement Engineering has been used to describe
the work associated with eliciting and writing
requirements for many years. It is a subset of the
work done in System Engineering. Maybe it is the
wrong term. What do we really do with science and
math in the process? Are people expecting some
software package to do the job and eliminate all
the hard work? Maybe we are focused on the wrong
thing because of the name we have given the
work.
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About the
speaker: Ivy Hooks is President and CEO of
Compliance Automation, Inc. For nearly twenty years
Ivy and her company have focused on requirements -
how to elicit, how to document, what are the
sources of defects, how to manage. Ivy's book,
Customer-Centered Products: Creating Successful
Products Through Smart Requirement Management,
is widely read by individuals, used in corporations
to develop a requirement process, and is also
required reading in a number of college courses.
Ivy's previous career, with NASA, took her from the
Apollo program through the design of the space
shuttle and management of the shuttle flight
software. Ivy has addressed conferences and
symposia and published articles on the subjects of
requirements definition and management.
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