One of the biggest challenges we face in IT is demonstrable & measuable ways to access the quality of IT specifications.

So, it was extremely refreshing to find a great article just published this week over at www.ModernAnalyst.com titled: ’ Using Extreme Inspections to Significantly Improve Requirements Practice’.

The article focusses on applying Quality Assurance techniques to IT documentation. It’s written by German engineer Rolf Goetz, who has obviously been at the coal face and clearly appreciates many of the challenges we all face in establishing more empirical ways to improve process.

Much of what Rolf talks about leverages work from Tom and Kai Gilb and others.

What I found refreshing, is that the article shines a light on the area of quality, similar to our mantra at VisibleThread. As ModernAnalyst (where this article was published) is a relativly mainstream portal for BAs, highlighting the value of inspections to this much wider audiance is great to see.

The emphasis in the article is on collaborative inspections. Rolf and indeed many of the proponents of these techniques, prefer the term ‘inspection’ over ‘reviews’, specifically suggesting ‘inspection’ of a random set of document pages yielding clear metrics around defects that can be extrapolated to the rest of the doucment(s).

I’m not so sure I care as much about the nuances of terms like ‘inspection’ vs ‘review’. I do however very much agree with the notion of spot checking a random sampling of document pages frequently rather than taking a more big bang ‘gated review’ approach. The latter is by definition somewhat more reactive and less effective that the former. Either approach however is preferable to the status quo in many organisations that we come across, i.e. little or no formal review.

So, whether we have frequent inspections or more back ended review of specifications, any kind of early intervention during the analysis phase and formal/informal review or inspection process is to be heartily welcomed. Too often, many organisations do not have even rudimentary vetting/validation procedures in place.

What was doubly exciting for me in this article is that you see the actual ROI of inspection in clear terms. Utilising the approach of ‘extreme inspection’ in one case Rolf cites, we see a reduction in the number of defects per page by 50%. Clear empirical evidence of actual defect reduction as a consequence of inspections in real projects is hard to come by and so Rolf’s case studies are useful to consider.

Broadening out the discussion; we’re currently working with a number of major customers especially in the financial services sector & without exception, the key goal is to establish an effective review (inspection) process backed by automation and very clear metrics.

In this respect, Rolf’s article is timely and very welcome in that it shows clear evidence in a ‘real-world’ example of what is possible from a defect detection perspective in specifications, albeit in a manual way. We are seeing that automation via VisibleThread can substantially magnify the efficiency of the rate of discovery of these defects, indeed often allowing inspection where heretofore resourse pressures have made it difficult to pull off.

I’ll be interested to see more of this kind of of coverage in the main stream media. My hope also is that VisibleThread can allow wider exposure and adoption in a meaningful way of the types of techniques described. Now there’s a very exciting thought…

If you’re interested in looking into this area more, Tom Gilbs work can be found at: http://www.result-planning.com/Requirements and Niels Malotaux at http://malotaux.nl/nrm/pdf/ReviewInspCourse.pdf

Fergal.

This Webinar took place on Thursday, 25th February, 2010.
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Feel free to download any of the following resourses:

• Webinar Slides
• Webinar Screencast

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‘This talk gives you, in a very short amount of time, some of the most valuable requirements information you will hear this year’

Join thought leader Ian Alexander, noted requirements guru and author of ‘Discovering Requirements’ to learn key techniques for uncovering poor quality and incomplete requirements.

In this no-cost, one-hour Web seminar, you’ll see:

• Key Validation techniques for uncovering quality issues during the requirements process
• Clear check lists for spotting quality issues that threaten your projects
• Practical “how-to” tips based on real-life project examples
• An understanding of how to automate the validation of your documented Requirements with clear metrics using the VisibleThread quality solution.

This co-hosted webinar will provide you the information you need to significantly improve the quality of requirements in your organisation and see how this can be achieved in an automated way eliminating tedious manual review cycles.

Featured Speakers:

Ian Alexander
Principal, Scenario Plus

Ian Alexander is an independent consultant, trainer and author specialising in Requirements Engineering. He has worked with organisations in transportation, telecommunications, aerospace, government and public service in the UK and around the world, on both implementation projects and process support.

He is the lead author of Writing Better Requirements (2002), Scenarios, Stories, Use Cases (2004), and Discovering Requirements (2009)

He is the chairman of the BCS Requirements Engineering Specialist Group.

Fergal McGovern
Founder, VisibleThread

Fergal McGovern has worked in software for over 20 years, both in the US and Ireland. Fergal is founder of VisibleThread and works closely with major corporate clients to help them achieve requirements process improvement, leveraging the ground breaking VisibleThread automated quality checking solution.

From Governance - The State of Play, December 24, 2009

As part of his recent blog titled: ‘Governance - The State of Play’, David Norfolk, Practice Leader Development at Bloor Research blogged on the area of ‘Automation of Governence’.

David commented (and we couldn’t agree more):

“…Automation of governance looks attractive but it often doesn’t do everything you want it to, even though it usually costs far too much for small players to take on. So, governance gets done manually, with the consequent risk of of human error. The usual attitude is that governance is just a cost of doing business, you do as little of it as possible and concentrate on “compliance” (which is a subset of governance), you concentrate on meeting the letter of any regulations (without thinking of their spirit over-much), whilst making sure, as far as possible, that governance doesn’t get in the way of doing business. If you keep your head down and can point to some visible governance initiatives, hopefully there’s a good chance the regulators—or the press—will look elsewhere anyway…”

“With this approach, governance represents a continuing cost, which doesn’t deliver much in the way of effective risk management. There must be a better way.”

David outlined some of the key characteristics he sees as desirable for tooling in this space and he mentioned VisibleThread as a solution that can play a role in satisfying these needs:

“Here, we have another tool to look at: VisibleThread from the team which originally developed the SteelTrace requirements management tool (now Compuware’s Optimal Trace). VisibleThread isn’t a requirements management tool, nor a document management tool but a bit of both—and more. VisibleThread enables documentation reviews that can QA document structure (to make sure that what should be present is present); highlight ambiguous language in poor quality documents; and promote process improvement through real-time visibility and objective metrics.”

Read David’s full blog entry here: Governance - The State of Play

Baltimore, MD—December 22 2009—VisibleThread today announced the immediate availability of version 1.1 of it’s On-demand & On-premise offering, adding a Best Practice Usage Matrix view and import/export capability for Best Practices.

“The Best Practice Usage Matrix means that we now have a very simple way to monitor multiple project adherence to specific document formats in a single view, whilst the import facility allows us quickly set up appropriate reference SDLC templates for new deployments” commented John Cheesman, principal at UK based Strata Software.

“We have had very positive feedback from our customers since launch of 1.0 and have incorporated many of the requested capabilities into this new release providing even better monitoring capabilities for Best Practice adoption.” said Fergal McGovern, VisibleThread CEO and founder.

VisibleThread delivers a birds eye view of IT document completeness and quality across all projects. It provides metrics that make it easy for stakeholders to improve documentation processes and evidence compliance with SDLC Best Practice.

Major new capabilities included in this release include:

• Import/Export capability for Structure/Quality Best Practices. This release introduces an ability to import and export Best Practices. The export allows you store the Best Practice in an XML format. Two sources can be used for imports; you can import either from a previously exported file at some location on your file system OR you can import from a URL location where the exported file has been made available.
• Best Practice Usage Matrix. The Structure Best Practice Usage Matrix introduced in 1.1 facilitates an overview of all Structure & Quality Practices and any associated documents or document sets.
  Reviewing the matrix allows you quickly identify projects (i.e. document sets) that may not be using the appropriate Best Practice. Conversely you can easily identify Best Practices that remain un-associated, easily spotted by identifying gaps in the matrix.
• Permissions for Best Practice modification. Users must now have admin rights in order to create, modify or delete Best Practices. If they don’t they are presented with a screen informing them of this.
• Enhanced Properties Screen. When you select a document or any element in the tree you are presented with the properties for that item. For documents and Best Practices this info includes: Added by, Added on, Last modified by, Last modified on.

Media Contact

Andy Brewer
Uptrending
Phone: (650) 681-9327 or andy@uptrending.com

About VisibleThread

VisibleThread helps corporate IT departments create superior project documentation that leads to successful projects. Our document structure and quality analysis tools, combined with the ability to create tailor-made best practices documents, provide customers with the insight and metrics they need to make better decisions throughout the IT project lifecycle. VisibleThread ensures a uniform approach to IT documentation resulting in consistency across documents, higher quality outputs and lowered cost.

We recently received the following question:

“I work for a small subsiduary. Can you recommend sources of documentation templates so I can build best practice to model for our parent company? Then I could recommend visible thread to propagate the standards.”

The question opens up the very interesting, highly subjective & contentious topic of software process & the ‘best’ document template. I thought I’d blog on this and share an extract of my answer as it may be of some help to folks considering this whole area. Not a simple question, but here was my answer:

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A number of questions have a bearing on what type of documentation you use in the lifecycle. I like to consider these things:

• Size, duration and distributed nature of projects?
  Larger projects require more controls, distributed projects also require more controls. Long duration projects also require more controls. (i.e. gates in your process and associated templates)
• Size of projects, are these projects you work on mission critical or not, or a mix?
  The former require heavy oversight, whilst they can be ‘agile’ in very sophisticated organisations, they typically are waterfall if you look closely. Less mission critical projects require way less docs and can be far more flexible in the depth of content captured.
• Style of projects, are these projects you work on waterfall in nature or iterative (or agile)?
  In reality, many organisations claiming to be iterative/agile tend to be ‘fakes’ when you dig to any extent under the covers, in other words whilst they may have that tag they will turn out to be waterfall. Either way, both approaches require change and need to be measured for change over time in terms of document content
• Culture of your organisation, is your org open to adopting better practices, are they able to absorb change quickly?
  If your org culture is somewhat resistant, I would recommend getting some kind of buy in from management & gradually introduce revised templates over a period of say 2-4 months, addressing certain key areas initially, eg: get a decent func reqs spec in place along with an associated non-funcs spec template in place is always an excellent start.

Regarding templates here a few sources to get you going:

1.) A requirements template I always recommend is James and Suzanne Robertson’s Volere, which can be found at: http://www.volere.co.uk/template.htm This used to be a free download, although I see James and Suzanne are now charging a nominal fee. Worth it however as it is very strong and covers out a wide set of considerations in requirements analysis.

2.) Another good option is to search docstoc (or scribd) for templates. Here’s one that I like (and this ships as a sample set in VisibleThread) for non-functionals: http://www.docstoc.com/docs/287018/Non-Functional-Requirements-Document-Template

3.) There is an open source project at: http://readyset.tigris.org/ It attempts to compile and assemble a fairly complete collection of templates for the various states of the software lifecycle. Specifically the full list of templates is at: http://readyset.tigris.org/nonav/templates/frameset.html Whilst it is an interesting project it comes out of academia and is very light on the early stages of articulating requirements but better on later stage docs. Worth a look but I would be inclined to cherry pick and augment with better sources.

We tend to base our guidance on using VisibleThread as the way to help power your approach. VisibleThread does come with a number of very good Best Practices out of the box (based on our own experience and on service partners practices) but in fact any Best Practice template can be used and applied in VisibleThread within 5 minutes to form the basis of any quality and process improvement initiative.