Quality Assurance in Requirements Management - Requirements Engineering and Management for Software Development Projects - page 93

6.2.2 Right People with Right Training
This is another pre-requisite to ensure that quality is in-built in the deliverables of
the requirements engineering activity.
Who are the right people to carry out the requirements analysis? A few years
ago, senior programmers, that is, the programmers that had put in a minimum of 2-
4 years of experience in programming work were initiated into requirements
analysis work under the close supervision of a project leader. Those were the days
of mainframe computers. It continued until recent times. The advent of COTS
products like ERP, SCM, CRM etc. caused this practice to change. In the projects
implementing the COTS products, functional specialists with training on the
specific product were utilized to analyze requirements. These individuals worked
in the respective functional areas, be it material management, HR, or marketing;
then received training in the usage of the COTS product and worked on imple-
menting the product at a couple of sites in the minimum. Now, owing to a shortage
of these functional specialists, the practice has moved forward to utilizing people
with MBA (Master of Business Administration) or an equivalent educational
qualification to carry out the requirements engineering function with some training
on the product and requirements engineering. Universities started offering courses
in business analysis to bridge the gap between the demand and supply of business
analysts. The function of managing requirements rests with the software project
manager in most of the organizations.
Now, as the present scenario exists, all persons enumerated below are utilized
by organizations to carry out requirements engineering activity:
1. Senior software engineers who worked on similar functional domains
2. Functional Specialists with training on the respective product, especially in the
projects implementing COTS products
3. People with MBA or equivalent qualifications and training in the requirements
engineering
4. Project leaders and project managers
Who among these are the right individuals to carry out this activity? We cannot
prescribe only one set of qualifications and experience to handle requirements
engineering in all types of projects. My recommendations are based on the type of
software project, which are as under:
1. Full life cycle software development projects—It is advantageous to utilize
either functional specialists or project leaders or project managers who have
handled projects in the same functional domain earlier.
2. COTS product implementation projects—In these projects, we can utilize
functional specialists or people qualified in business administration or business
analysis with training on the respective COTS product.
3. Conversion/migration/porting projects—in these projects, functional domain
has little significance. Therefore, for these types of projects, senior software