Research consistently shows that a large percentage of projects fail to deliver intended business results because they don’t capture the voice of their customer. One of the key reasons for such project failures is that teams lose sight of customer needs in the middle of the project, which results in them spending roughly one-third of the overall budget and time rectifying issues that originate in the requirement management process.
Even though most project teams do a thorough requirements gathering at the beginning of a project, rarely does the customer interaction carry through to the end because it is limited to a one-time effort at the beginning of the project. Overtime requirements will change. A successful requirements management practice should therefore include constant communication with customers and stakeholders, as well as regular documentation and validation. Otherwise, the end result will not be relevant and the project will have been a waste of money. End users will reject the product if it no longer meets their needs or expectations.
Having a clear understanding of the customer requirements and getting them correct is imperative. One can argue that documents, email, phone calls, and stakeholder meetings are more than enough to manage requirements. However, this approach doesn’t always guarantee a clear requirements definition that is communicated and understood by everyone.
CollabNet TeamForge is the premier collaborative software development platform on the market today. It fosters collaboration by unifying the development communities, and integrating disparate tools and technologies. TeamForge comes bundled with a number of open source tools.
These include:
• Subversion for software configuration management
• Git for software configuration management
• Review Board™ for code review
• Gerritt for code review
• Black Duck® Code Sight™ for code search
• Jenkins for continuous integration
• Hudson for continuous integration
With TeamForge:
- User can import formal requirements into a Tracker in the TeamForge project workspace. Trackers help to manage requirements, EPICs, Stories, tasks, issues and more. They can be used for creating workflows and associations, enabling traceability, or for managing ownership, status and activity.
- The Project Dashboard provides an at-a-glance overview of the status of each project member’s projects, including information on the number and status of tasks and tracker artifacts for each project, as well as project statistics.
- Within a requirement artifact, one can create child requirements or dependencies and also create associations to code commits, documents, wikis, test cases & change logs – for tracking the history of the artifact. This provides lifecycle requirements traceability.
- The Bulk import tool – can import spreadsheets into a tracker. It has out of the box integrations for HPQC and can help to integrate any Requirements Engineering tool.
- Using tools like the TeamForge, wiki and mailing lists users can collaborate with other team members and start decomposing the formal requirements into Epics and User Stories which can be tracked in a linked set of Agile planning folders.
- Baseline documents can be added to the baseline repository. Create or amend user stories as needed in agile planning folders, groom product backlog, plan the next sprint and deliver working software that meets specification.
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