- The Requirements Process in Context
- A Case Study
- Project Blastoff
- Trawling for Requirements
- Quick and Dirty Modeling
- Scenarios
- Writing the Requirements
- Quality Gateway
- Reusing Requirements
- Reviewing the Requirements
- Iterative and Incremental Processes
- Requirements Retrospective
- Evolution of Requirements
- The Template
- The Snow Card
- Your Own Requirements Process
- Formality Guide
- The Rest of This Book
This chapter is from the book
This chapter is from the book
This chapter is from the book
Requirements Retrospective
You are reading this book about a requirements process, presumably with the intention of improving your own process. Retrospectives, sometimes known as lessons learned, are one of the most effective tools for discovering the good and bad of a process, and suggesting remedial action. Retrospectives for requirements projects consist of a series of interviews with stakeholders and group sessions with the developers. The intention is to canvas all the people involved in the project and ask these questions:
- What did we do right?
- What did we do wrong?
- If we had to do it again, what would we do differently?
By looking for honest answers to these questions, you give yourself the best chance of improving your process. The idea is very simple: Do more of what works and less of what doesn’t.
Keep a record of the lessons learned from your retrospectives. While humans have memory and can learn from their experience to their advantage in future projects, organizations don’t learn—unless you write down the experience. By keeping the lessons learned available in some readily accessible manner, subsequent projects can learn from your accomplishments and mishaps.
Your retrospective can be very informal: a coffee-time meeting with the project group, or the project leader collecting e-mail messages from the participants. Alternatively, if the stakes are higher, this process can be formalized to the point where it is run by an outside facilitator who canvases the participants, both individually and as a group, and publishes a retrospective report.
The most notable feature of retrospectives is this: Companies that regularly conduct retrospectives consistently report significant improvements in their processes. In short, retrospectives are probably the cheapest investment you can make in improving your own process.