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The Rebirth of Requirements and Analysis through Agility Eric has worked in the software development industry for over 20 years and is co-author of UML for Database Design and UML for Mere Mortals both published by Addison Wesley. Eric is currently responsible for capabilities marketing of Rational’s application lifecycle management solutions including Agile Software Delivery, Quality & Test Management, Requirements Management and Collaborative Lifecycle Management. He rejoined IBM in 2008 as the team leader for InfoSphere Optim Solutions and later was responsible for Information Governance Solutions. Prior to rejoining IBM, he worked for Ivar Jacobson Consulting as VP of Sales and Marketing. Before joining Ivar Jacobson, he was director of product marketing for CAST Software. Previously working for IBM, Eric held several roles within the Rational Software group including program director for business, industry and technical solutions, product manager for Rational Rose and team market manager for Rational Desktop Product. He also spent several years with Logic Works Inc. (Acquired by Platinum Technologies and CA), as product manager for ERwin. As I think about IT today, there comes a rebirth in some ways of the importance of architecture and requirements. We are in an era of “ANY” -- meaning that applications and data can be accessed from anywhere, by anyone, and at any time.
Looking back at the applications of yesteryear (two or three years ago), we didn’t expect much from the web or mobile-based applications. We could view, run some reports or do some basic tasks, but to do the real work, we needed to go to the fat-client. Now, in today’s era of any, the user interface may look different, but the capabilities had better be the same since we expect near full capabilities no matter our device or interface. This puts a new found set of requirements on applications and their development, and is making modeling and requirements (analysis and design) relevant again, but with a new twist – AGILITY. It is no longer a question of “what platform am I developing for” – the question is how quickly can we get it up and running on the latest version of Apple, Android, HTML 5 and whatever other platforms our clients expect the application to run on … and it had better run on all of the latest versions, with no delays, when updated operation systems come out. And the question that I often receive now, however, is “can I be agile and meet these needs at the same time”? The plain answer is, yes, you can. However, agility doesn’t me you cannot ignore requirements and design. I am not talking about write-once, run-anywhere, rather instead understand the true requirements so that the various development teams can articulate them in code brought to life as features for the users, as they expect to see them. Users are looking for the application to be specific to their hardware/OS (iPad/AppleOS, Droid/Android…) as the hardware has become the platform for not just running the application, but the expected look, feel and usability of it now, too. This often means different developers for different deployment platforms, certainly at the User Interface level. Designing applications requires that we are prepared. Architectures must be solidified and communicated. Requirements must be consistent and shared. We must model architectures so that developers can build to the designs and not recreate their own, wasting time and resources, and we must share those designs across the team. Does this get in the way of agility? NO, it will speed agility. By sharing designs, assigning tasks based on architecture needs, we can speed time to market and our ability to deliver high quality software. In the era of any, we may have multiple teams working on the same front-end capabilities for different platforms even though the back-end is the same. But the more they can share, the faster they can be deployed and having the right requirements from users, the more satisfied they will be. We see people changing their desired platform as employers, vendors and suppliers change requirements, so we need to be prepared for the customer who is using an iPad today to be using an Android device tomorrow with the same requirements on the application. Just look at how the world of Blackberry has evolved. So, as you think about your next project, don’t skimp on requirements and architectures or you may be limiting your agility in the future rather than speeding your time to satisfied clients. 
DISCOVER RELATED RESOURCES TAGGED [analysis alm guest requirements jazz ibmalm agile rational ibm jazz.net clm design requirements-management]
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