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.