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One of the goals of the ORMF project is to be able to support recognised requirement management standards. Before plunging into the task head first, we at ORMF need to identify which standards are of interest and to have sufficient details on these to analyse the effort required to support them in terms of both elucidation and reporting. We are looking for professionals who are knowledgeable or simply interested in this area to assist in performing this survey. Our aim is to gather sufficient information to be able to validate the ORMF model, which is currently being elaborated, against its ability to support each of the candidate requirement standards. The main task would be to perform a general survey of the industry. This would take the form of a list of standards, a short description of its focus, intent, purpose, etc., and a list of the documentation that is generally produced by the practitioners of the standard (with pro forma examples where possible). From this list and the recommendations of the survey participants, the team will select the candidate standards, which will be used for the model validation process. If at all possible, the model will be refined to fit the requirements of those standards. At the end of the process the ORMF team will be confident in the framework's ability to support the chosen standards and future development efforts will be directed towards this aim. If you would be interested in contributing to the survey or you are simply interested in monitoring the progress, please send me an email and also sign yourself up to this Eclipse bugzilla issue that has been opened to collaborate and document this effort.
APG is interested in contributing to this effort as requirements management is a key element of enabling our products and services in enterprise architecture, portfolio management, systems engineering, and solution delivery. APG has considerable experience helping organizations establish effective requirements management capabilities supported with various commercial tools (Rational, Telelogic, etc) based on open standards. APG is also a committer on the Eclipse Process Framework (EPF) project and has created several commercial products on the EPF platform, most recently the APG TOGAF Process Library (ATPL). APG is also an active member of the Object Management Group (OMG) and The Open Group. There are several RM standards that might be applicable that I'm sure others have considered: - IEEE Std 830-1998: Recommended Practices for Software Requirements Specifications - IEEE Std 1233-1998: IEEE Guide for Developing System Requirements Specifications - Business Analysis Body of Knowledge (BABOK) from the International Institute of Business Analysis (IIBA) - Open Unified Process - Requirements Management Practice Looking forward to seeing where this goes!
I second Chris's comments that we should make reference to currently available requirements standards. We should probably create a Glossary of Terms for requirements management (see my requirements management glossary at http://www.softreq.com). We should all be on the same page with our terminology. For instance, when we say "requirements management standards", are we referring to "business requirements" or "software requirements"? Business requirements focus on process improvement, whereas software requirements focus on describing attributes of software features. Some projects create as many as 20 different requirements types, ranging from business requirements, to technical design requirements, security requirements, data requirements, etc. Each different requirement type may have a different set of stakeholders. There are also many different methods employed during requirements discovery. Use cases, user stories, prototyping, Agile, etc. etc. There are also many different target technical platforms. One person may be defining requirements for a website, whereas another is defining requirements for logic about to be burned into a circuit board. Another person is defining requirements for a "real time" system for military purposes. A good requirements management standard recognizes there are many different types of requirements, different stakeholders, different discovery methods and different target technical platforms. Yet, requirements management, at it's very core, is the same for all situations!
Hello, I would like to contribute to the effort. The recognized requirements standards are certainly a foundation to start with. My approach to requirements elicitation is to often employee a workflow diagram to obtain shared understanding. A common and public standard for relating elements on a workflow diagram to textual requirements would be extremely valuable. This may seem simple but a generally accepted approach could help many engagements.
A big thank you to everyone who has decided to participate or simply observe. Hello and welcome to the survey! I would like to make a start, but before that, let me clarify a point. A few of the people who have got in touch with expressions of interest in this survey have expressly mentioned personal ideas on what a requirement should be or contain, ideas that they have perhaps formed during the course of a long and painful experience and that they would like to contribute and share. This is extremely valuable information to us at ORMF, however it is not the main intent of the survey, which is about the investigation of existing requirements standards. If there is interest in contributing personal ideas (and, as I said, we would personally be very eager to listen), I will open a Bugzilla sub-issue for the purpose, for people to submit their ideas and for the survey team to discuss. Ok, now to the main topic. I am attaching a pdf document that briefly describes what we would like to get out of the survey and how we propose to go about it. Please have a look at it, comment on it if you wish and let's start playing! :-)
Created attachment 116280 [details] What are the expected results of the survey and how to go about it
Terry's idea of a Glossary of Terms for Requirements Management is a great idea, I think (see comment #2). Terry, since you already have got a head start :-) ,would you like to take charge of that?
Added dependency on newly created sub-issue for standard IEEE Std 830-1998, suggested by Chris Armstrong.
Added dependency on newly created sub-issue for standard IEEE Std 1233-1998, suggested by Chris Armstrong.
Added dependency on newly created sub-issue (https://bugs.eclipse.org/bugs/show_bug.cgi?id=252349) for standard BABOK, suggested by Chris Armstrong.
Added dependency on newly created sub-issue (https://bugs.eclipse.org/bugs/show_bug.cgi?id=252350) for standard BABOK, suggested by Chris Armstrong.
