Without adequate customer involvement, the inescapable outcome at the end of the project is an expectation gap, a gulf between what customers really need and what developers deliver based on what they heard at the beginning of the project ([ref240]). This is shown as the dashed lines in Figure 2-1. As with the previous story, the expectation gap comes as a rude surprise to all stakeholders. In our experience, software surprises are never good news. Requirements also get out of date because of changes that occur in the business, so ongoing interactions with customers are vital.

Figure 2-1. Frequent customer engagement reduces the expectation gap.

The best way to minimize the expectation gap is to arrange frequent contact points with suitable customer representatives. These contact points can take the form of interviews, conversations, requirements reviews, user interface design walkthroughs, prototype evaluations, and—with agile development—user feedback on small increments of executable software. Each contact point affords an opportunity to close the expectation gap: what the developer builds is more closely aligned with what the customer needs.

Of course, the gap will begin to grow again immediately as development proceeds after each contact. The more frequent the contact points are, the easier it is to stay on track. As the progressively shrinking small gray triangles in Figure 2-1 illustrate, a series of such contact points will lead to a far smaller expectation gap at the end of the project and a solution that is much closer to the actual customer needs. This is why one of the guiding principles of agile development is to have ongoing conversations between developers and customers. That’s an excellent principle for any project.

Before we can talk about customers, we need to discuss stakeholders. A stakeholder is a person, group, or organization that is actively involved in a project, is affected by its process or outcome, or can influence its process or outcome. Stakeholders can be internal or external to the project team and to the developing organization. Figure 2-2 identifies many of the potential stakeholders in these categories. Not all of these will apply to every project or situation, of course.

Figure 2-2. Potential stakeholders within the project team, within the developing organization, and outside the organization.

Stakeholder analysis is an important part of requirements development ([ref222]; [ref248]; [ref115]). When searching for potential stakeholders for a particular project, cast a wide net to avoid overlooking some important community. Then you can focus this candidate stakeholder list down to the core set whose input you really need, to make sure you understand all of the project’s requirements and constraints so your team can deliver the right solution.

Customers are a subset of stakeholders. A customer is an individual or organization that derives either direct or indirect benefit from a product. Software customers could request, pay for, select, specify, use, or receive the output generated by a software product. The customers shown in Figure 2-2 include the direct user, indirect user, executive sponsor, procurement staff, and acquirer. Some stakeholders are not customers, such as legal staff, compliance auditors, suppliers, contractors, and venture capitalists. Gerhard, the manager we met earlier, represents an executive sponsor who is paying for the project. Customers like Gerhard provide the business requirements, which establish the guiding framework for the project and the business rationale for launching it. As discussed in Chapter 5 business requirements describe the business objectives that the customer, company, or other stakeholders want to achieve. All other product requirements need to align with achieving those desired business outcomes.

User requirements should come from people who will actually use the product, either directly or indirectly. These users (often called end users) are a subset of customers. Direct users will operate the product hands-on. Indirect users might receive outputs from the system without touching it themselves, such as a warehouse manager who receives an automatic report of daily warehouse activities by email. Users can describe the tasks they need to perform with the product, the outputs they need, and the quality characteristics they expect the product to exhibit.

Customers who provide the business requirements sometimes purport to speak for the actual users. They are often too far removed from the work to provide accurate user requirements, though. For corporate information systems, contract development, or custom application development, business requirements should come from the person who is ultimately accountable for the business value expected from the product. User requirements should come from people who will press the keys, touch the screen, or receive the outputs. If there is a serious disconnect between the acquiring customers who are paying for the project and the end users, major problems are guaranteed.

The situation is different for commercial software development, where the customer and the user often are the same person. Customer surrogates, such as marketing personnel or a product manager, typically attempt to determine what customers would find appealing. Even for commercial software, though, you should strive to engage end users in the process of developing user requirements, as Chapter 7 describes. If you don’t, be prepared to read reviews pointing out product shortcomings that adequate user input could have avoided.

Conflicts can arise among project stakeholders. Business requirements sometimes reflect organizational strategies or budgetary constraints that aren’t apparent to users. Users who are upset about having a new information system forced on them by management might not want to work with the software developers, viewing them as the harbingers of an undesired future. Such folks are sometimes called “loser groups” ([ref082]). To manage such potential conflicts, try communication strategies about project objectives and constraints that can build buy-in and avoid debates and hard feelings.

An excellent software product results from a well-executed design based on excellent requirements. Excellent requirements result from effective collaboration between developers and customers (in particular, actual users)—a partnership. A collaborative effort can work only when all parties involved know what they need to be successful and when they understand and respect what their collaborators need to be successful. As project pressures rise, it’s easy to forget that all stakeholders share a common objective: to build a product that provides adequate business value and rewards to all stakeholders. The business analyst typically is the point person who has to forge this collaborative partnership.

The Requirements Bill of Rights for Software Customers in Table 2-1 lists 10 expectations that customers can legitimately hold regarding their interactions with BAs and developers during the project’s requirements engineering activities. Each of these rights implies a corresponding responsibility on the part of the BAs or software developers. The word “you” in the rights and responsibilities refers to a customer for a software development project.

Because the flip side of a right is a responsibility, Table 2-1 lists 10 responsibilities that the customer has to BAs and developers during the requirements process. You might prefer to view these as a developer’s bill of rights. If these lists aren’t exactly right for your organization, modify them to suit the local culture.

These rights and responsibilities apply to actual customers when the software is being developed for internal corporate use, under contract, or for a known set of major customers. For mass-market product development, the rights and responsibilities are more applicable to customer surrogates such as the product manager.

As part of project planning, the key customer and development stakeholders should review these two lists and negotiate to reach a meeting of the minds. Make sure the participants in requirements development understand and accept their responsibilities. This understanding can reduce friction later, when one party expects something that the other is not willing or able to provide.

The leader of a corporate requirements organization once posed a problem: “I’m experiencing issues in gaining agreement from some of our developers to participate in requirements development,” she said. “How can I help them understand the value of their participation?” In another organization, a BA experienced a clash between developers seeking detailed input for an accounting system and an IT manager who simply wanted to brainstorm requirements without using any specific elicitation techniques. “Do readers of your book risk cultural conflict?” this BA asked me.

These questions exemplify the challenges that can arise when trying to engage BAs, developers, and customers in a collaborative requirements partnership. You’d think it would be obvious to a user that providing requirements input makes it more likely that he’ll get what he needs. Developers ought to recognize that participating in the process will make their lives easier than being hit on the head by whatever requirements document flies over the proverbial wall. Obviously, not everyone is as excited about requirements as you are; if they were, they’d probably all become business analysts!

Culture clashes frequently arise when teams are working on requirements. There are those who recognize the many risks associated with trying to develop software based on minimal or telepathically communicated requirements. Then there are those who think requirements are unnecessary. It can be tough to gain business-side cooperation on projects like legacy-system replacement if users see this as unrelated to their own business problems and not worth their time. Understanding why people resist participating in requirements development is the first step to being able to address it.

It’s possible that the resisters haven’t been exposed to solid requirements practices. Or they might have suffered from poor implementation of requirements processes, perhaps working on a project that produced a large, incomplete, and ignored requirements specification. That would leave a bad taste in anyone’s mouth. Perhaps the resisters don’t understand and appreciate the value of those practices when performed effectively. They might not realize the price they have paid for having worked in a casual and unstructured environment in the past. That price mostly shows up as unexpected rework that leads to late deliveries and poor software. Such rework is buried in the daily activities of the project participants, so they don’t recognize it as a serious inefficiency.

If you’re trying to get developers, managers, and customers on board, make sure everyone understands the past pain the organization and its customers have experienced because of requirements problems. Find specific examples to demonstrate the impact in case individuals haven’t felt the pain themselves. Express the cost in units that are meaningful to the organization, be it dollars, time, customer dissatisfaction, or lost business opportunities. Development managers aren’t always aware of how badly requirements shortcomings hurt their teams’ productivity. So show them how poor requirements slow down design and lead to excessive—and expensive—course corrections.

Developers are stakeholders in the project, but sometimes their input isn’t solicited and they become the “victims” of the requirements that are thrust upon them. Therefore, they benefit from providing input that will make the requirements documentation as useful and meaningful as possible. I like to have developers review requirements as they are evolving. That way they know what’s coming and can spot areas that need more clarity. You also need developer input when specifying internal quality attributes that aren’t visible to users. Developers can offer suggestions no one else might have thought about: easier ways to do certain things; functionality that would be very time-consuming to implement; unnecessary imposed design constraints; missing requirements, such as how exceptions should be handled; and creative opportunities to take advantage of technologies.

Quality assurance staff and testers are also valuable contributors to excellent requirements. Instead of waiting until later in the project, engage these sharp-eyed people in the iterative review of requirements early on. They’re likely to find many ambiguities, conflicts, and concerns with the requirements as they are developing their test cases and scenarios from the requirements. Testers can also provide input on specifying verifiable quality attribute requirements.

Resistance to process or culture change can indicate fear, uncertainty, or lack of knowledge. If you can discern the source of the resistance, you can confront it with reassurance, clarification, and education. Show people how their participation not only is in their personal best interest but also will lead to collectively better results.

The organization’s leadership must understand the need for the organization to have effective business analysis and requirements engineering capabilities as strategic core competencies. Though project-specific and localized grassroots efforts are important, without management commitment, the improvements and benefits likely won’t be sustained after the project ends or following a reorganization.

There can be hundreds of decisions to make on software projects; often, they are on the critical path to being able to move ahead. You might need to resolve some conflict, accept (or reject) a proposed change, or approve a set of requirements for a specific release. Early in your project, determine who the requirements decision makers will be and how they will make decisions. My friend Chris, a seasoned project manager, pointed out, “I have found that there is usually one primary decision maker on a project, oftentimes the key sponsor within the organization. I don’t rest until I have identified that person, and then I make sure he is always aware of the project’s progress.” There’s no single correct answer as to who should make key decisions. A small group representing key areas—such as management, customers, business analysis, development, and marketing—generally works best. Chapter 28 describes the change control board, which serves as the decision makers for proposed requirement changes.

The decision-making group needs to identify its decision leader and to select a decision rule, which describes how they will arrive at their decisions. There are numerous decision rules to choose from, including the following ([ref092]):

There is no globally correct or appropriate decision rule. A single decision rule won’t work in every situation, so the group must establish guidelines so they know when to vote, when to reach consensus, when to delegate, and so on. The people who will be making requirements-related decisions on each of your projects should choose a decision rule before they confront their first significant decision.

Reaching agreement on the requirements for the product to be built, or for a specific portion of it, is at the core of the customer-developer partnership. Multiple parties are involved in this agreement:

Many organizations use the act of “signing off” (why not “signing on”?) on the requirements as the mark of stakeholder approval. All participants in the requirements approval process should know exactly what sign-off means or problems could ensue. One such problem is the customer representative or manager who regards signing off on the requirements as a meaningless ritual: “I was handed a piece of paper with my name on it, so I signed on the line above my name because otherwise the developers wouldn’t start coding.” This can lead to future problems when that individual wants to change the requirements or when he’s surprised by what is delivered: “Sure, I signed off on the requirements, but I didn’t have time to read them all. I trusted you guys—you let me down!”

Equally problematic is the development manager who views sign-off as a way to freeze the requirements. Whenever a change request comes along he can protest, “But you signed off on these requirements, so that’s what we’re building. If you wanted something else, you should have said so.”

Both of these attitudes ignore the reality that it’s impossible to know all the requirements early in the project and that requirements will undoubtedly change over time. Approving a set of requirements is an appropriate action that brings closure to some stage of requirements development. However, the participants have to agree on precisely what they’re saying with their signatures.