Pitfalls and Best Practices in Requirements Engineering and Management - Requirements Engineering and Management for Software Development Projects - page 197

The best practice is to adopt a process driven approach in the early stages of the
organization itself so that the projects are executed in a disciplined manner from the
beginning.
14.2.2 Provision of Resources
Organization provides resources without which even work itself cannot be
performed. But often organizations overlook on the quality of resources. Some
organizations entrust the requirements engineering activity to software engineers
themselves who are not knowledgeable in the project's domain. In some cases,
senior software engineers are assigned and in some cases, even programmers are
assigned to the requirements activity. When the resources are not properly qual-
ified or trained, and are assigned to perform an activity, the activity suffers on both
the quality and productivity fronts. Obviously, the requirements are not defined
properly resulting in many change requests during the project execution. Too
many change requests affect the rhythm of the software development resulting in
cost and schedule overruns at a minimum.
The best practice in this area is to provide qualified resources, with the right
kind of training in the requirements engineering activity, tools and techniques
thereof, as well as, mentoring on the job to make them full-fledged business
analysts. Only such people ought to be assigned the activity of requirements
engineering. When it becomes necessary to assign software engineers to require-
ments engineering activity for any reason, it is essential to provide them training in
requirements engineering and the project domain at a minimum before assigning
them the requirements engineering activity.
The Second pitfall that I have frequently observed is that inadequate time is
allocated to requirements engineering. Managements often push the project team
to begin coding before the project requirements are properly and comprehensively
established. Why organizations fall into this pit is because the project is allocated
with all the resources—all at once. It is better to space out the allocation of
resources on an ''as required'' basis. That way, the pressure to utilize the pro-
gramming resources would not exist and allows time to perform the requirements
engineering activity comprehensively. The best practice is to allocate an adequate
duration for carrying out the requirements engineering activity. I am not advo-
cating spending unending time in carrying out the activity but I do advocate giving
the requirements engineering activity due consideration and importance while
preparing the project schedule. The right amount of time needed for a project
depends on the nature of the project and the amount of work involved in estab-
lishing the requirements. What we need to do is to give this activity due impor-
tance and consideration during project estimation and scheduling so that the
activity is performed diligently and comprehensively.