Plug the holes in your requirements management process

In enterprise software delivery, requirements do much more than just define what a product is going to be — they’re the communication bridge across all the disciplines involved in planning, building, and delivering software at scale.

Yet for many organizations, the communication bridge isn’t as strong as it should be — instead, it’s littered with black holes where requirements (and other artifacts such as epics, stories and defects) disappear.

This is due to a fragmented workflow, as the best-of-breed tools used across the software value stream do not automatically flow artifacts across the process. Product-critical data gets locked in tools, putting the fidelity of information at risk. A wicked game of Telephone commences.

Trying to tie requirements to the work that takes place to create a value-delivering product is a constant challenge. Information isn’t static, and can change and be modified at any point by any practitioner in the value stream. This includes the customer themselves, whose most pressing needs and priorities can shift at the drop of a hat, thus impacting critical information (such as priority or description) on the requirement.

The result is lack of shared understanding of what is being built and why, due to a broken requirement management process. Consequently, the chances that these organizations are continuously and quickly delivering high quality output is low.

In my recent article for TheServerSide, I explain why Value Stream Integration addresses these issues, and why it’s the perfect partner for a dynamic requirement management process.

Speak to us today on how you can optimize cross-team collaboration by plugging those black holes in the communication bridge to ensure you’re delivering customer value every time.

Written by: Rebecca Dobbin

Originally published at www.tasktop.com on January 10, 2018.