Six Strategies for Orchestrating the Requirements Process

Since the creation of the Agile Manifesto, many development teams have embraced the guidelines of agile. By focusing on the customer and eliminating wasted development effort, developers have seen dramatic improvements in their software development – greater visibility and collaboration, lower risk, faster delivery of builds, and increased adaptability.

But, even if your development team has gone agile, it is likely that other internal development teams or partners that you work with have not completely left behind the “old school” methods. To further complicate matters, development teams are generally not purely agile or purely waterfall. Almost 75% of development organizations deliberately mix agile and other methodologies. Faced with this hybrid landscape, many organizations are back where they were ten years ago, struggling to deliver applications that customers really want and trying to eliminate waste.

Orchestrating your requirements process and technologies doesn’t happen overnight. However, for organizations to successfully manage the entire requirements lifecycle, there are some common success factors that will help them get there faster. This slideshow highlights six strategies identified by Serena Software that you can use to orchestrate your requirements process.

Click through for six strategies that can help you orchestrate the entire requirements lifecycle, as identified by Serena Software.

Above all, organizations must think about the end-to-end process of capturing, implementing, managing, and validating requirements. What are the key steps needed to work with all key stakeholders, prioritize and define which requirements are most critical, and deploy requirements into production as quickly as possible? A successful approach to requirements orchestration will help automate and streamline the process for reviews, approvals, and notifications – so everyone is on the same page regarding the latest status of customer requirements. Regardless of whether some teams adopt agile and others evolve into a hybrid way of working, organizations need to determine the right processes for how these teams should best work together.

There is no company that can provide all of the technologies you need to manage the entire requirements lifecycle. It's clear that the larger the organization, the greater the likelihood that different teams will use different technologies and techniques across the development ecosystem. Add customers and partners into the mix, and you’ll soon face a smorgasbord of technologies. An orchestrated requirements strategy needs to intelligently figure out which tools contribute to the efficiency of the process, which can be replaced, and how they can all work together in harmony.

The Greek philosopher Heraclitus could have been talking about customer requirements when he said, “The only constant is change.” In order to successfully navigate the requirements lifecycle, organizations need to be able to see, understand, and manage the impact of unending changes across all their development projects, customers, applications, and tools.

Organizations should determine how suitable a requirements reuse strategy is for them. The larger they are, the more projects they have, and the more teams involved in developing applications, then the more it makes sense to reuse requirements. Requirements reuse within an agile strategy has also become an increasingly painful topic for many organizations that are trying to deliver more and more frequent releases. However, requirements reuse isn’t just searching for requirements in a centralized repository. Organizations should think about the processes involved in sharing, changing, inheriting, and communicating requirements with impacted stakeholders.

While regulated industries may care a great deal about traceability and auditability of requirements, all organizations need to ensure that their releases meet the needs of their customers. Even in non-regulated industries, organizations can incur multimillion dollar penalties for missing key functionality in their applications.

Just like nobody does agile or waterfall development exactly the same way, there is no single “one-size-fits-all” solution for managing a requirements process. Organizations should look for “just enough” workflow and process functionality – focusing on processes, best practices, and technologies that give them the right amount of functionality they need. Instead of a “rip and replace” strategy to consolidate disparate systems, organizations should orchestrate the existing processes and technologies employees have already adopted.