Planning for Requirements Management - Requirements Engineering and Management for Software Development Projects - page 112

7.6.6 Measurement and Metrics

Measurement facilitates determining the progress quantitatively, which facilitates
drawing inferences and initiating necessary corrective actions commensurate with
the variance. Metrics facilitates benchmarking the performance with other projects
within the organization or with the other similar organizations. The aspect of
measurements and metrics relevant to requirements engineering and management
are covered in a separate chapter. SQAP normally contains all of the proposed
measurements for the project and so would contain the measurements and metrics
proposed to evaluate the requirements engineering activities. In some cases, SPMP
would contain this information. The plan would contain various measurements,
their periodicity, proposed metrics, the methodology to derive the proposed met-
rics and the formulas thereof, as well as the proposed analysis and benchmarking.
It would also contain the information of how and to whom the metrics information
would be communicated.

7.6.7 Formats and Templates for Planning

I have not provided the formats and templates for the plans discussed in this
chapter as the information pertaining to requirements engineering forms a min-
iscule portion of these plans. The plans contain many more aspects of project
planning and execution. Also, we do not make separate plans for requirements
engineering

activities and I do not advocate preparing separate plans for

requirements engineering activities.

7.7 Best Practices and Pitfalls in Planning

I have seen planning being treated as an exercise in creating planning documents.
This is the worst pitfall many organizations fall into. Planning is an exercise in
thinking trough the projects and evaluating every task in terms of the resources it
needs, the quantity, type and timelines the resources are required, the methodology
that is best suited to accomplish it successfully, the timelines for its performance,
and the tools and techniques necessary for its successful accomplishment. Docu-
mentation is to retain that thinking for reference throughout the duration of project
execution by all the stakeholders. But planning is certainly not an exercise in
creating documents.
Another pitfall that organizations frequently fall into is avoiding the documen-
tation altogether. There are many stakeholders to a project that include end users,
customers, organizational management, the project team, the quality assurance
department, finance and marketing departments, the program manager and so on.