Martin Crisp, Chief Technology Officer of Blueprint, has contributed a new whitepaper that discusses the needs for precise requirements definition in an AGILE project world. As an experienced research and development leader, Martin manages his R&D efforts in a highly iterative fashion, to ensure the company can respond to rapid changing customer needs.

In this upcoming whitepaper, Martin discusses how his team approaches requirements in a highly visual manner to ensure team alignment. Below is an excerpt from this upcoming whitepaper - talking about how specification documents (by themselves) are not the answer.

Requirements specification documents: Not the answer:
The traditional approach to defining and managing requirements typically results in the creation of very large, complex and hard-to-maintain requirements specification documents.

But this approach has led to considerable misunderstandings and misinterpretations of requirements between businesses and their IT departments or Product Managers and R&D.

As a result, projects must go through a lot of rework and cost/schedule overruns as requirements eventually become mature (i.e. precise, understood and stable) much later in the development process. The root cause is that traditional requirements approaches make it difficult for a customer to interpret these complex, static
requirements documents, envision the final software product, and thus validate the requirements.
Moreover, once these requirements specifications are approved, the pace of requirements maturity typically slows down even more because change management processes use a very cumbersome and manual process to maintain large and complex documents.

The white paper will be published to Requirements.net the first full week of March.