Requirements at the Speed of Thought
In the spirit of becoming more environmentally aware (and St Paddy’s Day!), it is important to look for ways to reduce the global footprint of requirements practices. We can all be sympathetic to the environment issue, working to solve it at a personal level. However, corporations really need to see a business value in implementing environmental programs in order to justify them. That business value might be in the form of government regulations, community pressures around their image, or simply cost savings. Software development projects span global regions, often because the teams are distributed and often because multiple regions need to develop the same software. But whatever the reason, requirements experts are hopping aboard planes more than ever to elicit, review and communicate requirements with distributed teams. With that comes an enormous impact to the environment. One carbon calculator (http://www.carbonfootprint.com/calculator.aspx) estimates that a flight from Austin to Tokyo generates two and a half tons of CO2 emissions. That is comparable to the emissions created from powering the average American household for nine months. Requirements activities necessitate working with people, usually to talk and draw pictures, but also to build trust, to read their body language, to hear what isn’t said, to see them execute tasks. This is often facilitated by forming relationships with the distributed teams through casual conversations in the hallway or over lunch. When those people are in different parts of the world, requirements experts have to fly to see them. Get Vocal One thing that we use heavily is Skype. Your team members can start collaborating with a simple set of headphones. Go Virtual We’ve heard of teams going to Second Life when they need to collaborate quickly. You miss out on the physical cues, but having the avatar gives you the sense of space that some projects so desperately need. Go Video A suggestion to get around this would be to use video to communicate comments about requirements. For example, a developer might read the requirements, click one button to record a question, and click another button to publish the video to the requirements engineer, repeating this process for every comment or question. This solution is as easy as sending an email, but with more of the subtle communications cues. The great news about these solutions, if implemented well is that there is business value in them for companies. They can save travel costs, while still deploying global projects. And their employees will be happier as they can be home with their families more frequently. This is just an introduction to an idea for reducing the global impact of requirements practices.
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As a requirements guppy, I focused on the user experience when developing requirements - when were messages displayed, what options were available, what were all of the things they could do? I was a hard-core use case junkie. Use cases seemed so simple to conceive and so simple to write. I loved meetings with users where we deconstructed what they did. I loved thinking of all the different scenarios, all the different paths to achieve their goals... |
  
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