Using Extreme Inspections to Significantly Improve Requirements Practice

Today I'm pround to announce that one of my latest articles has been published on modernanalyst.com:

Using Extreme Inspections to Significantly Improve Requirements Practice

It will be showcased next week in the Feb issue of the eJournal of ModernAnalyst.

From the introduction:
Extreme Inspections are a low-cost, high-improvement way to assure specification quality, effectively teach good specification practice, and make informed decisions about the requirements specification process and its output, in any project. The method is not restricted to be used on requirements analysis related material; this article however is limited to requirements specification. It gives firsthand experience and hard data to support the above claim. Using an industry case study I conducted with one of my clients I will give information about the Extreme Inspection method - sufficient to understand what it is and why its use is almost mandatory, but not how to do it. I will also give evidence of its strengths and limitations, as well as recommendations for its use and other applications.

Thank you, Adrian, for your support!

Who is your hero systems engineer?

These days, I‘m inquiring about engineering. I‘d like to know who your hero systems engineer was or is (or will be?). Please comment, or send me a twitter message. Thank you!

Thank you again for making it past the first paragraph. ;-) It all started when a couple of weeks ago I again was confronted with a colleague‘s opinion which said that I am a theorist. I refuse this opinion vehemently; quite the contrary, I believe my work, especially my work for the company, is a paragon of pragmatism. ;-)

So my argument against the opinion usually is ,no, I‘m not a theorist!', in a more or less agitated voice. Obviously, I need a better basis for making that point. Kurt Lewin said:

Nothing is a s practical as a good theory.

I used this sentence for a while as a footer for email that I suspected to raise the ,theorist‘ criticism again.

After all this sentence is only a claim as well, just like my stubborn phrase above. It may be stronger because it carries Lewin‘s weight. Unfortunately very few people instantly know who Kurt Lewin was, and that he most of all used experience - not theory - to advance humankind.

Then a friend of mine, a U. S. citizen who at some point in time chose to live in Norway (which is a very practical move in my eyes :-), pointed me to the work of Billy V. Koen, Professor for Mechanical Engineering at the University of Texas. You should watch this 1 hour movie if you are least interested in engineering, philosophy and art. Or in more mundane things like best practices, methods, techniques, recipes, and checklists, many of which concerning business analysis and project management can be found at Planet Project in case you don‘t know.

Here is Prof. Koen‘s definition of engineering from the movie:

The Engineering Method (Design) is the use of heuristics to cause the best change in an uncertain situation within the available resources.

Causing change in an uncertain situation within the available resources sounds a lot like project management to me. Like program or portfolio management, too. Maybe like management in general.

It is always when an improbable connection opens up between two different fields of my thinking when I find there is useful truth in it. Next, I want to learn about engineering and me, and one way to approach this is to find out who I admire for his or her engineering skills. I tried thinking of a couple of candidate names and found surprisingly few. I‘ve already identified Leonardo Da Vinci (who is not a Dan Brown invention like my nephew once suggested. :-) A quick request to the twitterverse offered nothing, no new name.

So this is my next take: I‘d like to know who your hero systems engineer was or is (or will be?), and why. Please comment, or send me a (twitter) message. Thank you!

Why High-level Measurable Requirements Speed up Projects by Building Trust

(Allow 5 minutes or less reading time)

Stephen M.R. Covey‘s The Speed of Trust caused me to realize that trust is an important subject in the field of Requirements Engineering.

Neither the specification of high-level requirements (a.k.a. objectives) nor the specification of measurable requirements are new practices in requirements engineering after all, just solid engineering practice. However, they both are extremely helpful for building trust between customer and supplier.

The level of trust between customer and supplier determines how much rework will be necessary to reach the project goals. Rework – one of the great wastes that software development allows abundantly – will add to the duration and cost of the project, especially if it happens late in the development cycle, i. e. after testing or even after deployment.

Let me explain.

If you specify high-level requirements – sometimes called objectives or goals – you make your intentions clear: You explicitly say what it is you want to achieve, where you want to be with the product or system.

If you specify requirements measurably, by giving either test method (binary requirements) or scale and meter parameters (scalar requirements), you make your intentions clear, too.

With intentions clarified, the supplier can see how the customer is going to assess his work. The customer‘s agenda will be clear to him. Knowing agendas enables trust. Trust is a prerequisite for speed and therefore low cost.

“Trust is good, control is better.” says a German proverb that is not quite exact in its English form. If you have speed and cost in mind as dimensions of “better,” then the sentence could not be more wrong! Imagine all the effort needed to continuously check somebody’s results and control everything he does. On the other hand, if you trust somebody, you can relax and concentrate on improving your own job and yourself. It’s obvious that trust speeds things up and therefore consumes less resources than suspiciousness.

Let‘s return to requirements engineering and the two helpful practices, namely specifying high-level requirements and specifying requirements measurably.

High-level Requirements

Say the customer writes many low-level requirements but fails to add the top level. By top level I mean the 3 to 10 maybe complex requirements that describe the objectives of the whole system or product. These objectives are then hidden somehow implicitly among the many low-level requirements. The supplier has to guess (or ask). Many suppliers assume the customer knew what he did when he decomposed his objectives into the requirements given in your requirements specification. They trust him. More often than not he didn‘t know, or why have the objectives not been stated in the requirements specification document in the first place?

So essentially the customer might have – at best – implicitly said what he wants to achieve and where he is headed. Chances are the supplier’s best guesses missed the point. Eventually he provides the system for the customer to check, and then the conversation goes on like this:

You: “Hm, so this ought to be the solution to my problem?”

He: “Er, … yes. It delivers what the requirements said!”

You: “OK, then I want my problem back.”

In this case he would better take it back, and work on his real agenda and on how to rebuild the misused trust. However, more often than not what follows is a lengthy phase to work the system or product over, in an attempt to fix it according to requirements that were not clear or even not there when the supplier began working.

Every bit of rework is a bit of wasted effort. We could have done it right the first time, and use the extra budget for a joint weekend fishing trip.

Measurable Requirements

Nearly the same line of reasoning can be used to promote measurable requirements.

Say the customer specified requirements but failed to AT THE SAME TIME give a clue about how he will test them, the supplier most likely gave him a leap of faith. He could then either be trustworthy or not. Assume he decided to specify acceptance criteria and how you intend to test long after development began, just before testing begins. Maybe the customer didn‘t find the time to do it before. Quite possibly he would change to some degree the possible interpretations of his requirements specification by adding the acceptance criteria and test procedures. From the supplier‘s angle the customer NOW shows your real agenda, and it‘s different from what the supplier thought it was. The customer misused his trust, unintentionally in most cases.

Besides this apparent strain on the relationship between the customer and the supplier, the system sponsor now will have to pay the bill. Quite literally so, as expensive rework to fix things has to be done. Hopefully the supplier delivered early, for more time is needed now.

So...

Trust is an important prerequisite to systems with few or even zero defects; I experienced that the one and probably last time I was part of a system development that resulted in (close to) zero defects. One of the prerequisites to zero defects is trust between customer and supplier, as we root-cause-analyzed in a post mortem (ref. principles P1, P4, P7, and P8). Zero defects mean zero rework after the system has been deployed. In the project I was working on it even meant zero rework after the system was delivered for acceptance testing. You see, it makes perfect business sense to build trust by working hard on both quantified and high-level requirements.

In fact, both practices are signs of a strong competence in engineering. Competence is – in turn – a prerequisite to trust, as Mr. Covey rightly points out in his aforementioned book.

If you want to learn more on how to do this, check out these sources:

• Measurable Value (with Agile), by Ryan Shriver.
• How to rewrite a requirement / How to make it measurable (See a live example of a bad and a good high-level specification), by Tom and Kai Gilb.

You can also find related material on Planet Project:

• How to Specify High-level Requirements (aka goals).
• Requirements Hierarchies and Types of Requirements.

Atomic Functional Requirements

The discussion on shall vs. must at Tyner Blain , on which I have blogged recently, triggered me to wrap up what I have learned about atomic functional requirements over the years. 

See 3 principles and 4 rules on PlanetProject. Feel free to do responsible changes.

The article  explains how to write atomic functional system requirements so that the spec is easy to read, and ambiguity is kept to a minimum.

Note that it is NOT about the even more important (non-)functional user requirements here, in a sense of what a stakeholder expects from the system, which problems shall be solved, what shall be the inherent qualities of the solution etc. I do not intend to argue that any spec must include atomic, functional requirements. But sometimes setup is so that it must. Don't forget to establish the context first.

Now enjoy the article on how to write atomic functional requirements. Thanks for your comments.

News in the Field of Systems Engineering

For a VERY comprehensive monthly newsletter on Systems Engineering go to the Project Performance International website. A quote from the site:

Project Performance International is proud to produce a monthly Systems Engineering newsletter, named "SyEN". The newsletter presents in-depth coverage of the month's news in systems engineering and directly related fields, plus limited
information on PPI's activities and relevant industry events.

The nice thing is, advertising is REALLY limited. I find the newsletter do be both interesting and easy to read. They will send you and E-Mail with an table of contents, and you can then go to the website and read it. PDF format ist also provided.
From this months contents:

• Featured Article: The ISO Way - Alwyn Smit
• Featured Society: Association for Configuration and Data Management (ACDM)
• Systems Engineering Software Tools News
• Systems Engineering Books, Reports, Articles and Papers
• Conferences and Meetings
• Education
• People
• Related News
• Systems Engineering-Relevant Websites
• Standards and Guides
• PPI News
• PPI Events