Improve results of IT projects with Requirements Engineering techniques

Successful outcome of software projects is greatly influenced by proper requirements.  During this masterclass Business IT Nerd gathered information to improve the results of IT projects by proper Requirements Engineering techniques within a large enterprise organization.

Practical research

This was done based on research which consisted of a lot of questionnaires and interviews with Product Owners which were in charge of setting up the requirements for IT projects.

The results of the research revealed the following:

  • The impact of bad requirements on the outcome of IT projects is significant. It is very important to setup requirements from the very beginning and change/refine them during the project.
  • Most Product Owners in large organizations do not know the subject of Requirements Engineering at all.
  • About 30% of all Product Owners being interviewed did not use any Requirements Engineering technique.
  • It turned out that a lot of Product Owners worked in isolation – they do not collaborate with IT experts or stakeholders.
  • There is a lack of differentiation of the business and the technical requirements and Product Owners do not split the functional and non-functional requirements.

Most successful requirements engineering aspects

The following Requirements Engineering aspects are considered most successful:

  • Elicitation of requirements (conduct workshops and analyze existing systems).
  • Analysis of requirements (formal prioritization process, put requirements into fixed categories).
  • Specification of requirements (consistent way and form to write them down based on natural language).
  • Validation of requirements (formal inspection, automatic control).

All of these contribute to improve results of IT projects by proper Requirements Engineering techniques.

Failure of projects

Business IT Nerd analyzed why IT projects failed based on a bad Requirements Engineering process and gave practical tips on how to use Requirements Engineering techniques. This aligned the projects with the strategic vision and goals of the organization. This led to:

  • Shorter time to market for software applications.
  • Better quality of the applications being delivered.
  • Faster feedback for incremental versions of the software.
  • Being able to respond to (external) changes faster.
  • Improved collaboration between Scrum teams.
  • More time to spend on innovative projects which led to companies being more attractive for people to work for.

More info

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