How Plain Language helps you flush out risky IT docs. - August 23rd, 2011, by Fergal

I have blogged recently about Plain Language here. This was in the context of poor quality RFP and bid response docs. The basic premise: if you apply some basic Plain Language checks to your writing, quality will increase.

In this post, I wanted to look at the IT space to see how we can improve documented requirements.

As background, people like Tom and Kai Gilb argue for improving IT requirements quality by rewriting them in a notation (Planguage) that is measurable and testable. This is really great if your team is able and willing to adopt that approach. In most business organisations however, it is a bridge too far. This is because BAs (Business Analysts) are not conditioned to translating informal English into mathematical statements.

Here I argue for a less radical and more digestible alternative; running a basic plain language check. This leads to dramatically improved requirements quality. More importantly, it is very workable in pretty much all organisations.
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