The requirements
document that never got
to the developers.
In the spring of 2005 I
had the pleasure of
visiting India.
While I was there I
spent time at several
organizations discussing
with them how to become
more agile. Part
way through the trip I
spent some time with a
gentleman who worked for
an IT outsourcing
service firm. One
aspect of his job was to
take the large
requirements documents
provided by their
American clients, which
were typically hundreds
of pages in length, and
to summarize them down
to something less than
ten pages. This
summary was then
provided to the
development team, not
the detailed
requirements. They
did this because they
discovered that no
matter how well the
documentation had been
written the problem
still remained that the
documents were error
prone, contradictory,
and far too verbose.
This in turn led to the
wrong software being
developed.
Experience showed them
that by giving the
developers the overview
document and then having
them talk with the
client on a regular
basis, daily conference
calls were common, that
they could do a far
better job. In
short, this CMMI level 4
firm discovered that a
significant productivity
improvement (SPI)
strategy was to reduce
requirements
documentation, not
increase it.
Granted, writing this
document up front would
hopefully have had the
benefit that the client
settled on a common vision.
However, they could still
have achieved this same goal
without having to write some
much documentation (e.g.
perhaps they should have
just written the 10-page
summary to begin with).