Exemplars for better requirements - tales from the trenches

Summary form only given. Good requirements don't just happen; they come from effective practices. And effective practices come from distillation of experience. In her job as a consultant Suzanne Robertson has worked on a wide variety of projects in diverse socio-technical domains. She has had the opportunity to discover good practices by examining the way that successful requirements projects are run and by identifying patterns of behaviour that are common to those projects. This talk is about these requirements exemplars - patterns to emulate - that she has distilled from experience with projects in many different cultures. The talk reviews a selection of requirements exemplars such as: requirements foundation (what's the best base?); product in parallel (two different scopes?); knowledge versus documents (which is which?); rooms with walls (why bother?); maximum disruption (why cause chaos?); linguistic integrity (what language do we speak?); eating the orange (which knife to use?); the waiting room (now or later?); and Lewis and Clark (when to explore the unknown?). Examples from real projects support the discussion along with ideas for how to make use of exemplars in your own environment.