I have been working as a software consultant for more than 11 years. Because of that I am an eager supporter of lean principles and agile methods.
Capturing requirements in large “non-agile” enterprises seem to follow a common template:
- Business stakeholders are anxious to catch all of their known requirements into the first release.
- Users generate hundreds of detailed requirements that often bear little relationship to the business problems that need to be addressed.
- Most requirements are given the highest priority.
- Requirements are signed off before handed over to design and implementation.
- The requirements represent today’s view, which will most certainly have changed by the time all requirements are implemented.
In Methods & Tools’ latest newsletter Ian Evans shares his experiences on Agile Delivery at British Telecom, where he addresses the problem above as well as other problems related to agile adoption at an enterprise level.