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Amin is a second year grad student in the MS Software Management program, a former Software Design Engineer from Microsoft and a current Software Engineer at Adify, a Silicon Valley startup. He is passionate about entrepreneurship, software and traveling. He would love to start a software company someday. |
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Vineet is a second year part-time software management student, currently working @NetApp also nominated as the best place to work in North America recently. His area of expertise is Oracle ERP solutions. Other professional areas of interest are SaaS markets both technologically and business wise. @CMU he wants to grow his knowledge to manage software products and businesses. He is interested in work on start up ideas. On the personal side he loves to spend time with his family and travel. |
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Rene is a recent alum, a manager of operations and program manager in Cisco's software development organization, the mother of two daughters and a performing arts fan. |
Thursday, March 22, 2007
Systems and Requirements - I
“The relevance of gathering and generating software requirements to a software project and a software company are well documented. Nevertheless, it does surprise me that 40% of defects of software projects and products are attributed directly to software requirements.”
- Dean Leffingwell and Don Widrig, Managing Software Requirements
This statement, taken from one of the books we are studying currently, struck me profoundly, that there really is such a high failure rate in the requirements-gathering process related to software projects and products.
Is it possible that as engineers, we jump to solutions before really having spent adequate time on identifying the users and understanding the needs of these end users? Is it true that, as noted author Alan Cooper puts it, the inmates really are running the asylum?[1]
These are some of the issues that have been brought up and discussed during my current class. Systems and Requirements is a 14-week course which goes through the various methodologies for managing software requirements. In this course, I have been placed on a team with four other members. As a team, our goal is to gather and document product vision, requirements, and a product roadmap.
This course is broken up into two “mini-semesters,” each seven weeks long. We’ve just concluded the first mini-semester, in which we met with various corporate representatives from the hi-tech industry. Each of these representatives deal with project and portfolio management in their respective firms, and gather requirements using contextual design techniques. Our team was able to interview software professionals from Oracle, Boeing, and Market2lead. We interviewed them on their daily routines and work habits. These interview and requirement-gathering sessions gave us insight on how to balance current needs vs. existing solutions within the project management space. We were pleasantly surprised with the tools that the users were using.
Most of the time in the mini-semester was spent in:
1. Reading course material and research material
2. Analyzing the interviews
3. Documenting and modeling the user needs and requirements.
In each team-based project, each team member takes on different roles. For this course, I took on the role of being editor for the initial set of deliverables. Apart from the time I spent incorporating feedback from my team members, I noticed that I spent less time working on the assignment and readings compared to the previous semester. However, that time was re-allocated to time spent thinking about a product vision or in discussion with my team members and peers during brain-storming sessions.
In the next mini-semester, we will focus on creating a requirements document and a product roadmap. A big part of the Carnegie Mellon West learning style is to teach students using a learn-by-doing philosophy. In that vein, classes are usually conducted as if we are working for a fictitious company, in which our professors play the executive roles of CEO, VP of Marketing, etc. So once we create the requirements document and product roadmap, we will be expected to successfully pitch both to the CEO and VP of Marketing. I feel fairly confident that our product vision is on target. But even though I think our product vision is cool, the thrust of the course is not about the product idea, but about defining the target user of the solution and capturing the business requirements.
A note on infrastructure and technology
Carnegie Mellon West provides a truly remote learning experience that is suited for the global economy. About 30% of my classmates are remote and attend the classes through web and voice conferences. They are located predominantly in the west coast, however, we also have classmates throughout the U.S. and even overseas in Korea, India and other countries.
What’s great about having a remote program like this one is that you can be traveling, for work or pleasure, and still participate in the program. One of our team members was on a personal visit to India and did have some trouble connecting to us during the initial sessions and team meetings, even though he had brought his VOIP router with him to India. I think he was dialing in from Delhi. He did mention a major power outage as one of the reasons why VOIP did not work for him. At the same time, however, another classmate who was in India was more successful when connecting through Yahoo voice and IM chat for a few weeks.
Next Time: With one-third of the program completed so far, I intend to dedicate the next blog to the method and process of learning at CMU-West.
[1] Alan Cooper. The Inmates are Running the Asylum: Why High Tech Products Drive Us Crazy and How to Restore the Sanity (2nd Edition). Sams 2004
posted by Carnegie Mellon Silicon Valley @ 10:55 AM
