Harnessing the Power of Agile: Why Your Organization Needs a Modern Requirements Tool

Featured article by Ruth Zive, Vice President of Marketing, Blueprint Software

The technology to support Agile requirements has undergone significant transformation in the past few years. Yet many organizations aren’t aware of all of the capabilities that best of breed Agile requirements tools possess. That includes visualization, collaboration, reuse and management analytics. Today’s cream-of-the-crop requirements tools also integrate with project management tools that business and development teams use every day. This enables the level of collaboration and alignment that organizations must have for successful Agile delivery.

Modern Agile requirements tools help close the gap between business and IT, making it easier for organizations to scale Agile successfully. Not only will this help an organization mature Agile and reinforce the processes currently in place, but it also will improve project success. Let’s examine some of the reasons why this is necessary.

Breakthrough collaboration

When projects don’t meet their original goals and business objectives, inaccurate requirements management is often the problem. In fact, the Project Management Institute’s 2014 Pulse of the Profession report found this to be true in 47 percent of cases.

Requirements management is clearly critical, making modern requirements tools imperative to success.

The thing is, user stories aren’t enough when it comes to enterprise Agile. Business analysts and business partners can easily create visual models, like use cases, process models, customer journey models and screen mock-ups. With the right tools in place, these models can be used to automatically generate consistent and high quality user stories. In the end, user stories are the result of collaboration instead of a source of conflict.

Business analysts should be able to easily share requirements artifacts with business and technical stakeholders. They should have capacity to send requirements to business stakeholders online for review and receive input via threaded discussions and e-mail conversations. Business and technical stakeholders will benefit from working with requirements in their own toolsets, while having clickable access to related artifacts, like regulatory information, visual models, and business rules that help them understand the big picture.

Improved interactions with business and technical stakeholders. Business stakeholders often have busy schedules, different preferences and varied concerns. The right requirements tools allow Agile teams to use stakeholders’ input efficiently.

A technology platform enables business analysts to simplify the requirements review process for busy stakeholders, by providing them just the specific requirements relevant to them. Stakeholders can provide input and collaborate easily online using threaded discussions and email-driven conversations – and this applies even to those who aren’t Agile aware.

The right tools also enable business analysts to automatically generate user stories and their acceptance criteria, and push them into the development team’s Agile management tool.

For instance,business analysts can use process models to automatically generate user stories and their acceptance criteria and push them into the development team’s Agile management tool. Instead of creating these artifacts manually, developers and testers get the information they need fast, and they know it’s accurate. They also have access to related requirements information, like regulatory information, visual models and constraints, to provide a comprehensive understanding.

The right tool also supports the needed level of collaboration between business and technical teams. Stakeholders can interact with development teams without the need for daily meetings or a glut of technical information. Business analysts and product owners can drive the communication between the two groups to make the best use of business stakeholders’ time, tracking interactions and input.

Accelerated requirements definition and reduced rework.

Agile’s focus on speed has the potential to compromise requirements quality. That risk can be mitigated while also helping teams deliver better requirements more quickly.

Without a platform, teams define and manage requirements in silos. They can’t leverage work done by other teams, because they don’t have an effective way of sharing them. A centralized requirements repository enables teams to reuse existing requirements artifacts, including visual models, user stories, and business rules, accelerating requirements development and saving organizations money.

Visual models provide cues that are key to analyzing information more effectively. Individually, they allow stakeholders to view a requirement from different perspectives and at varying levels of detail. Their power is multiplied when they are linked to one another, so stakeholders can analyze them collectively to understand relationships between requirements and other artifacts. Visual models and the ability to establish precise traceability among them helps teams ensure full requirements and test case coverage.

Many requirements, like those for regulatory compliance, security, and performance, can be reused. With the right tool, organizations can develop a high quality, authoritative source of complete and accurate information for these standard requirements. Access to pre-defined requirements artifacts, including user stories, visual models, business rules and other artifacts, speeds up delivery processes while maintaining quality. Requirements reuse improves standardization, governance and adoption, while reducing duplication of efforts.

Nonfunctional requirements, like those for security, performance and compliance, define the quality attributes of a solution. A list of predefined categories helps business analysts think about elicitation questions in buckets, and the lists of predefined questions within each category speed up interview design and improve requirements coverage.

The bottom line is that enterprises require enterprise-class solutions to maintain control. Best-of-breed Agile requirements solutions are necessary for success for all of the reasons previously laid out, but by no means are those the only reasons. A robust solution’s capabilities shine whether teams follow Waterfall, Agile, a hybrid methodology or any of the newer “enterprise Agile” frameworks, such as Large Scale Scrum, Disciplined Agile Delivery, and Scaled Agile Framework.

If you’ve seen some Agile success but have been unable to scale your Agile practices, you need to understand why. You may think your biggest challenges are related to roles, skills and processes, but don’t underestimate the importance and benefits of connecting the entire team—business and IT—through the right technology.

About the author:

Ruth Zive, Vice President of Marketing

Ruth is a metrics-driven marketing strategist who has worked for two decades serving B2B clients in the technology, healthcare and financial services industries. At Blueprint, Ruth is responsible for product marketing, analyst relations, branding, demand generation and inside sales initiatives.