Business challenge
One of the most common challenges facing software development teams involves inaccurate, incomplete or inconsistent requirements. This is not only an issue for IT but also for the business—leading potentially to the delivery of a system that nowhere near meets actual requirements.
Solution
To improve requirements definition, your business and IT teams must work together in a smart way. We have a long record of helping customers bridge the IT/business gap to ensure accurate, usable and efficient requirements. As the father of use cases, Ivar Jacobson himself has more than 30 years’ experience eliciting requirements and documenting them through the use-case approach. His thought leadership and knowledge in this space is captured in our practices.
What’s required first and foremost is change. At Ivar Jacobson International, we have a number of practices that help us implement change in a way that is practical, efficient and easy to understand. Change is a real challenge. To help build support for it, our consultants join your team and lead by example, demonstrating the value of change.
Collaboration overview
Typically, our consultants join your analyst team and work with both business and IT representatives. We lead a number of requirements-gathering workshops to define the scope and vision of the project, and to identify detailed requirements as well as the tests needed to verify them. Guiding your team, will help you produce:
- A project vision
- Use case models
- Use case descriptions
- Scenarios
- Test cases
- Prototypes
We implement an iterative approach that promotes close collaboration with all stakeholders and regular deliveries of executable code.
How this benefits you
- Development of accurate requirements
- Development of a usable solution
- Stakeholder involvement that promotes close collaboration and in turn helps achieve success
Sample implementation
Working with a specific client, we undertook multiple phases of change. During the first, we produced a full set of requirements in terms of vision, scope and use case outlines—and fully developed a set of architecturally significant use cases, prioritized and implemented through a number of workshops.
After the first six-week elaboration iteration (during which we developed the basic flows of two significant use cases), we had mitigated approximately 80% of known technical risks. The technical solution was verified for customer representatives just prior to the iteration assessment, which again involved the whole team. This allowed us to review, amend and agree on requirements detailed to date.
The second elaboration iteration resulted in more working software and mitigated the majority of remaining technical risks. The customer was intimately involved in all requirements workshops and even initial design workshops—helping ensure that what was developed was truly needed. A standard and practical way of defining the requirements was implemented and the analyst team took this use case-based approach forward as its standard.
Working collaboratively and sharing the effort to identify and document requirements developed trust and understanding between the delivery team and the customer. During construction, some requirements were changed and priorities amended. By the end of construction, the customer had received all the functionality deemed essential, satisfying the project’s original objectives.
Work finished within the original timeframe and budget (amended by agreements as the project progressed). More important to many team members was the total freedom from stress at the end of the project. Quality was also higher than most had experienced even though testing resources were unavailable through early iterations, reducing regression testing. Our Ivar Jacobson International practices left the client with a standard way of defining, communicating and implementing requirements using use cases and an iterative approach.
Effort used: Two use case courses, six use case and project management workshops and 20 days’ mentoring—all within a six-month period.
What we left behind: A set of IJI practices, associated templates and guidelines to help all future projects adhere to established standards, guided by a certified analyst team.