The Business ROI for Requirements – Essential Best Practices for driving Quality with Karl Wiegers

http://www.vimeo.com/16967033

Webinar occurred Wednesday, November 17, 2010 from 2pm to 3pm EST

Industry thought leader Karl Wiegers, noted requirements guru and author of ‘Software Requirements’ and Fergal McGovern, founder of VisibleThread gave this co-hosted webinar to learn the importance of key techniques for uncovering poor quality and incomplete requirements. Learn how automation with VisibleThread can solve the critical issues.

This co-hosted webinar provided pragmatic information helping to significantly improve the quality of requirements in your organisation and see how this can be supported in tangible ways with VisibleThread for Waterfall (SDLC) and Agile processes.

Featured Speakers:

Karl Wiegers Principal Consultant, Process Impact

Karl E. Wiegers  has provided training and consulting services worldwide on many aspects of software development, management and process improvement. Prior to starting Process Impact in 1997, Karl spent 18 years at Eastman Kodak Company. His responsibilities there included experience as a photographic research scientist, software applications developer, software manager, and software process and quality improvement leader. Karl has led process improvement activities in small application development groups, Kodak’s Internet development group, and a division of 500 software engineers developing embedded and host-based digital imaging software products.

Karl is the author of the following books:

Practical Project Initiation: A Handbook with Tools (Microsoft Press, 2007) More About Software Requirements: Thorny Issues and Practical Advice (Microsoft Press, 2006) Software Requirements, 2nd Edition (Microsoft Press, 2003) Peer Reviews in Software: A Practical Guide (Addison-Wesley, 2002) Creating a Software Engineering Culture (Dorset House Publishing, 1996)

Karl has also written more than 170 articles on many aspects of software, chemistry, and military history. He has served on the Editorial Board of IEEE Software and as a Contributing Editor for Software Development magazine.

Karl received a B.S. degree in chemistry from Boise State College, and M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in organic chemistry from the University of Illinois. He is a member of the Association for Computing Machinery. He is a frequent speaker at software conferences and professional society meetings. When not at the keyboard, Karl enjoys reading military history, cooking (favorite recipes I made up), drinking wine, playing his Les Paul and Stratocaster guitars (loudly), and riding his Suzuki VX800 motorcycle (quietly).

Fergal McGovern Founder, VisibleThread

Fergal McGovern has worked in software for over 20 years, both in the US and Ireland. Fergal is founder of VisibleThread and works closely with major corporate clients to help them achieve requirements process improvement, leveraging the ground breaking VisibleThread automated quality checking solution.

VisibleThread for IT

2:48 minutes
This summary overview shows the business case for using VisibleThread for IT programs. It shows why up to 42% of IT project cost can be attributed to defective documentation and demonstrates how VisibleThread addresses this large business issue.

Red-flagging Bad Language

3:47 minutes
There are some words/phrases that you should avoid in a proposal. This short video shows how VisibleThread scans and red-flags 'bad language' in your RFP Responses.

Using Discovery to spot Gaps

2:28 minutes
Identification of key concepts in issued documents (RFP etc.) helps align the language of the response volumes. Discovery in VisibleThread can uncover mismatches and lack of alignment between issuer and response docs to support reviews and underpin a winning bid.

Validating Win Theme Language

4:43 minutes
Win themes articulate business differentiation. Too often, with multiple contributors and authors, it is hard to keep theme language consistent.

Here we see how VisibleThread validates response docs against win themes by:

A starter compliance matrix in 3 minutes

4:20 minutes
Proposal Managers have to manually scan issued documents or pdfs to spot requirements prefaced with 'shall', 'must' etc. and track them in spreadsheets. This demo shows an 'obligation scan' run against a draft RFP pdf. All instances of 'will', 'must', 'shall' are identified. It concludes by generating a first pass of an Excel Compliance Matrix.

Collaborations and Team Reviews with
Discussions

5:31 minutes
Managing inputs from multiple contributors and conducting efficient team reviews is critical to successful outcomes. This demo shows how VisibleThread supports collaboration using web based discussions.

Integrating with MS SharePoint

2:36 minutes
VisibleThread integrates with MS SharePoint using an intuitive import capability. This short demo shows how you can import an MS SharePoint document for analysis.

Plain Language Analysis

4:11 minutes
Plain Language Analysis drives clear documentation. This demo outlines how VisibleThread can identify long sentences, passive langauge and facilitate plain langauge audits.