Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
4.26 Can Requirements Be Captured in an Email or
PowerPoint Slides?
This might sound like a strange question, but it is not uncommon to hear it
in Agile organizations that are just starting out with a CMMI process effort.
First, the CMMI does not dictate the format requirements must be captured
in, so on the surface, nothing directly prohibits email or Microsoft Power-
Point slides from being used to document requirements. However, when
you look more closely at related expected practices and start asking a few
more questions the CMMI expected practices will raise, a different picture
often results.
For example, Requirements Management PA, SP 1.3 states:
Manage changes to the requirements as they evolve…
and SP 1.4 states:
Maintain … traceability among the requirements and work products.
These expected practices lead to the following questions:
How do you manage changes to requirements as they evolve if your require-
ments are captured only in email or PowerPoint slides?
Are you going to update the PowerPoint presentation or email whenever
changes are agreed to so the current set of accepted requirements is clear?
One of the reasons traceability is an expected practice is to ensure our testing
addresses all requirements including any changes. For this reason I have
always suggested to clients that, while you might not need a formal require-
ments management tool, you do need to have your requirements organized
and managed in a way that supports the assignment of requirements identi-
fiers to each requirement so that those identifiers can be used in a test
document to ensure your testing is complete.
As you start to ask these questions that arise from using the CMMI to reason
about your processes, most organizations, including those with an Agile
culture, decide that email and presentation tools cannot adequately do this
job. Some very small organizations, and organizations with products that
have very stable requirements, might be able to survive with requirements
communicated through these means, but most organizations quickly recog-
nize the limitations of these mechanisms.
