the arrival of process

My department - and I am the ringleader on this particular item - is in the midst of changing our processes for software development. It was fairly informal, since our customers were internal. Ask them what they want, build it, give it to them. If there was any documentation, it served the developers more than the customers, perhaps explaining a particularly difficult piece of code.

The department was getting beat up right and left - and why? A few reasons. One, we were always late with our estimates. The "estimates" were usually really loose ideas given by managers before requirements were analyzed (which of course, they never were analyzed, not formally). And an additional reason why we weren't making our dates? Our customers would bring us new requirements, or complete changes in direction, at various points of the project - causing projects to extend and extend.

There are a lot of pain points here, especially for me, taking over from a guy who wrote applications for ten years and didn't really need to document them - after all, he was always going to be here to support them, right? And now that we're offshoring some of the development, I need a better way to communicate our requirements.

I'm proposing requirements elicitation and analysis, project vision/scope statements, use cases where applicable, a change management process by which we do not increase the scope without analyzing the cost and risks, and more. I've been doing a whole lot of reading in a variety of places [Books 24 is a great subscription to have ], getting a broad idea of industry best practices and combining it with what I learned in Software Engineering school and what I've done as a consultant. None of these ideas are new, but for some reason, they had never taken root here.

I'm really happy about the changes we're going to make. Already, use cases have come in handy. When I presented a set of use cases to the stakeholders and SMEs, they immediately understood what I was trying to capture, and I was able to get much better feedback from them. It worked like a dream, just like the books said it would! And the vision document - after reading what they came up with for a vision set into a simple paragraph, they realized that they had left something out of the scope - and we were able to fix that in the early stages. Without the vision document, I'm quite sure we would have proceeded to the end before discovering the missing requirement.