Using measures to understand requirements

Many approaches fashionable with technically-oriented practitioners clearly fail to satisfy the need for clarity of requirements. Some even trade short-term acceleration for long-term maintenance & support costs. What is missing? What can be done to ensure that new technologies help rather than hinder? This paper suggests some simple process improvements that might have made all the difference in a number of cases including: • A bespoke client/server development using Use Cases to drive OOA/D, cancelled at a cost of £5m GBP due to poorly understood requirements. • A global, multi-release d evelopment where the customer/supplier relationship broke down due to misunderstood tradeoffs between speed and productivity. • The case of an organisation driven by marketing & competition that has struggled to understand and control requirements and costs. • A case where the 'flow of requirements' to an outsourced supplier is controlled using measures agreed at a contractual level.