Business Analyst's Mentor Book : With Best Practice Business Analysis Techniques and Software Requirements Management Tips by Emrah Yayici

Author:Emrah Yayici [Yayici, Emrah]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2013-08-13T07:00:00+00:00

14. How Can Automation Help in Requirements Management?

In recent years, we have started to see a different “ware” category like hard-ware and soft-ware. This category is called “shelf-ware.” Shelf-ware represents the automation software that sits on the shelves of the company without being used by any single person.

Shelf-ware causes a huge amount of sunk cost for IT departments. In some public companies, high license and support costs paid for useless software has become an issue investigated during internal audits.

To prevent the shelf-ware situation, the following best practices should be taken into consideration during automation of the requirements management process:

Tools Are Wizards, but Not Magicians

Some IT managers want to press a button and let the computer automatically do the majority of analysis, design, and testing work instead of utilizing people for these tasks. Unfortunately, this is only a management dream.

Tools are wizards, but not magicians. They have limits. They can only help the project team do their work in a more convenient way by automating some of their tasks, but not all of them.

Think Big but Start Small

If the IT organization’s process maturity is at a good level, automation makes it better; otherwise, automation may even make it worse. Hence IT managers should first focus on improving their team’s requirements management skills and then give the start for the automation initiative.

If the team has no knowledge on basic techniques like use cases, traceability matrices, impact analysis, black box test techniques, and low fidelity prototyping, then automation will only bring extra problems rather than benefits and will accelerate the chaos.

An iterative approach of first implementing these techniques by using simple templates and then adapting the automation tools is the best-proven way of success.

Adam Smith and Software Engineering

Like the manufacturing industry, Adam Smith’s division of labor theory has also gained acceptance in software engineering. By using the new SDLC (systems development life cycle) tools, demand management, project management, business analysis, user interface design, technical design, coding, and testing processes can be managed in integration with each other on a common platform.

Requirements management tools let you receive, prioritize, and plan requests from business units.

Then they guide you in preparation of analysis documents. The requirements defined on these documents are automatically stored in a repository to enable end-to-end traceability.

Analysis and design diagrams like activity diagrams, sequence diagrams, and class diagrams can be prepared on these tools. With their integration with IDEs like Eclipse, they can automatically generate code by using the details on the design diagrams.

Test cases can be easily prepared by importing the requirements from the analysis module and combining them with risk-based test conditions. Regression tests can be automated by creating capture-and-play, data-driven, or keyword-driven test scripts on these tools. The defects found after each test run can then be associated with the relevant test cases, requirements, and projects.

In parallel to these activities, every update on the code, analysis, design, and test artifacts can be tracked by configuration management capability.

Application Lifecycle Management

Although these SDLC tools provide an integrated end-to-end requirements management capability, they have limitations in providing a collaborative platform for the project team.

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