Quality Assurance in Requirements Management - Requirements Engineering and Management for Software Development Projects - page 95

6. Seminars, workshops and tutorials—Professional bodies, universities and
research institutions conduct seminars, workshops and tutorials on various
topics of relevance inviting public participation. We nominate our professionals
when these are on the topic of requirements engineering. From these, our
professionals would gain insight into the experience of other organizations as
well as the discoveries of the latest research. We cannot provide this knowledge
through in-company training programs.
7. Participation in discussion groups and message boards—we encourage our
professionals to participate in message boards and discussion groups on the
topic of requirements engineering. These Internet forums provide for exchange
of information freely among participants. In fact, these have become the pri-
mary source of knowledge improvement because the question can be specific
and pointed to the issue at hand and relevant answers come forth. Such forums
are available on Yahoo, Google, MSN, and LinkedIn among others.
8. On-the-job Training—Even when a professional is trained in the discipline,
the person has a first project! During such occasions, the individual would be
closely supervised by a senior specialist to provide the person with first project
experience besides ensuring the success of the project. We used to refer to this
as ''apprenticeship'' earlier.
We adopt all of these vehicles for training in organizations. In addition to these
training programs, we also conduct project-specific training whenever a special
situation exists in the project.
6.2.3 Quality Control
We carry out these activities to ensure that quality was indeed built into the
deliverables. Verification and validation are the main activities for carrying out
quality control activities. These are separately discussed in subsequent sections of
this chapter.
6.2.4 Measurement and Analysis
We do not know the efficacy of the performance if we do not measure the per-
formance and benchmark it with similar performance within the organization or
outside the organization. This is a vital activity and a separate chapter is dedicated
for a detailed discussion of this topic.