Good Requirements Reduce Defect Costs
Here are some important statistics to share with your management. These statistics clearly support the importance of the role of the Requirements Lead/Business Analyst at your organization and why training in the industry standards and best practices is so important.
Pierson’s customers have found that it is a 200:1 cost savings to find defects in requirements rather than in the maintenance phase. Therefore, it is important to gather and write effective requirements and perform formal inspections and sign-off phases with the business community.
Studies performed at companies including GTE, IBM and HP have measured and assigned cost to errors occurring at various stages of the lifecycle. Studies were run independently and all reached the same conclusion. If at a unit cost of one is assigned to Coding, then the cost to detect and repair an error during the requirements stage is between five and ten times less. The cost to detect and repair an error during the maintenance stage is twenty times more. As much as a 200:1 cost savings results from finding errors in requirements versus finding errors in the maintenance stage.
Pierson Requirements Group, Inc. provides training in Writing Effective Requirements and User Acceptance Testing. Click on the links to view the class agendas and learn more about what best practices your project teams need to improve.
About Joy Matthews
Joy E. Matthews is the cofounder and Vice President of Training and Consulting Services for Pierson Requirements Group, Inc., (www.piersonrequirementsgroup.com), founded in 1990. She is an Information Systems Specialist with expertise in implementing Iterative Development and Joint Application Development using many development tools. She is accomplished in business modeling and facilitation techniques. She has participated in all phases of Information Engineering systems development and Total Quality Management projects. She has successfully completed Business Process Re-engineering, Information Strategy Planning, Business Area Analysis, Functional Area Analysis and Business System Design projects for a number of organizations and is a certified facilitator.
Joy trains the latest in UML and the use case methodology using JAD. She is an expert in JAD and UML best practices and industry standards. She is the co-author of Pierson’s repeatable development Methodology for Multi-Tier Architecture projects using Object-Oriented methods and JAD. Joy is the author of the JAD Facilitation and Requirements Gathering Seminar: A Process for Implementing Object-Oriented Projects. She is accomplished in Object-Oriented Requirements Analysis, Analysis and Detailed Design. She has facilitated and managed projects for all phases of the system development life cycle.
Joy is the author of the following seminars: Requirements Gathering & Writing Seminar using Data Techniques, JAD, UML and Use Cases, Business Analysis Seminar, Requirements Gathering & Writing Seminar using JAD, Use Cases and UML, User Acceptance Testing Seminar, Requirements & Specifications Seminar, Facilitated Session Leader Seminar, Learning Use Cases and UML Seminar and Writing Requirements That Work Seminar. Joy can be reached at jmatthews@piersonrequirementsgroup.com
