When we asked for suggestions for our Tip of the Month topics, it became clear that there is one issue that Requirements Engineers wrestle with on a regular basis: dealing with non-believers in Requirements Engineering. The main complaint is the lack of time allotted for Requirements Engineering efforts (lack of money will be addressed in a later tip). The same message came from both large and small companies - from purchased products to full product development. So, in this month's tip we will address this issue and one effective way to overcome it.

The Requirements Engineering effort seems to lack credibility.

Management and requirement suppliers do not see the value of the time spent on the task. The most effective way to illustrate the value of requirements engineering activities is to supply meeting minutes. Though we briefly introduced meeting minutes in an earlier tip (Earning Users Trust, September 2000), we are discussing this requirements engineering deliverable in more detail here.

Meeting Minutes work for all perspectives, focus areas, and communities.

For a Requirements Engineer, meeting minutes are a means of developing a rapport with requirement suppliers. These minutes show that you are doing the following:

• Listening to them.
• Understanding them.
• Accepting their input as important.
• Illustrating that the requirement supplier's time was not wasted, but well used.

Meeting minutes should be produced for all meetings and should be done when the meeting is fresh in both the supplier's and producer's minds - usually within twenty-four hours of the meeting. To save time, some companies develop minutes during the session and then immediately email them at the close of the meeting to all attendees and distribution lists. When requirement suppliers review the meeting minutes, they can usually provide additional information that was not previously supplied. It is extremely important to quickly build an acceptance by the users when working with untrusting suppliers.

Although meeting minutes are a tool that Requirements Engineers rarely use, when properly prepared, they are a powerful tool used to confirm requirements and source of decisions. They are also an excellent way to stimulate additional conversations that will provide clarification of requirements needed to complete your requirements set. This clarification is an important step between requirement elicitation/analysis and requirement specification.

Meeting minutes are not a court stenographer's reading of exactly what was said, word for word. Some thought needs to go into what and how you summarize the information received from the requirement supplier. This deliverable is a detailed summary of what the Requirements Engineer heard, and illustrates what is interpreted from the information provided. This document also provides another opportunity for requirement suppliers to rethink the information they provided and correct or clarify what they meant to say.

The meeting minutes also provide the Requirements Engineer with an opportunity to "twist" some of the requirements to ensure that his/her understanding of the requirements is correct, or to uncover additional requirements. The "twisting" of specific requirements is a method of changing a correct requirement into an incorrect requirement. This process should only be done in meeting minutes and never in requirement specifications. Twisting of a requirement is done to stimulate discussion that will assist in capturing more requirement details. It is important that the twisting of requirements be done by senior or lead Requirements Engineers with years of experience. The other mandatory situation with inserting twisted requirements into meeting minutes is that all users must read the minutes. Even when the two previously mentioned issues are addressed (done by experienced Requirements Engineers and read by all users), this technique should be used sparingly.

A scribe may be used to actually take notes and produce the meeting minutes while the Requirements Engineer facilitates the session. The Requirements Engineer should review the minutes before distribution to ensure controversial points are added to spark additional discussion, if necessary.

Sample Meeting Minute Template (pdf)

SBDi is available to work with your organization on Requirement related or Project/Program Management Anti-Patterns.

Our services include:

• Education of the management and development team on the value of the development, implementation and use of anti-patterns.
• Teaching how to identify, develop, validate, and implement anti-patterns.
• Developing project specific anti-patterns.
• Developing a divisional or corporate process for the development and implementation of anti-patterns.
• Review of existing anti-patterns for quality.
• Development of Meeting Minutes Standards, complete with a guide on how to use them on your current project.

Pat Ferdinandi