How To Overcome Modern

Software Challenges
With Requirements
Management
Contents

Introduction 3

What’s Causing The Biggest Bottleneck In Your Development Lifecycle? 4

Managing Requirements Effectively Is The Greatest Challenge For Large Organizations 5

Managing Business Compliance is Extremely Complex

Project, System, and Regional Teams Take Siloed Approaches

Regulations, Policies, and Guidelines Change

Teams Are Not Doing Enough Analysis

Bridge the Requirements Gap from Your Agile ALM Tool 6

Why You Should Consider Your Enterprise Context 7

How To Avoid the Bottleneck and Deliver Better Requirements, Faster 8

Visual Collaboration

Data Unification and Centralization

Agile Automation

Revolutionize Your Requirements Management Practice With Automation 9

About Blueprint 10
Introduction

Business and IT leaders are challenged to deliver software faster than ever to remain competitive in today’s
increasingly digital and customer-focused world. They must provide business value as quickly as possible
while adapting to changing strategies and managing enterprise risk. To meet these goals, leaders need to
accelerate development and delivery without compromising quality and compliance or incurring additional
costs.

As a result, team leaders have navigated their teams towards Agile transformation. Agile enables
organizations to respond faster to fluctuating market conditions, improve overall organizational
effectiveness, and enhance customer satisfaction. However, in today’s environment, Agile practices have
been implemented mainly at the team level, while the enterprise continues to operate in a traditional
environment.

Business leaders increasingly

understand the importance
of staying on top of
business requirements,
but nevertheless are
challenged with
aligning them with
the capabilities of IT
and the needs of
the customer.

How To Overcome Modern Software Challenges With Requirements Management 3

So, what’s the problem?
Requirements Cause The Biggest
Bottleneck In Your Development
Lifecycle

Requirements drive every aspect of a product’s delivery. Statistics show that activities related to
requirements can consume up to half of a release’s total hours. Business, IT, and compliance stakeholders all
care about requirements, but interact with them and use them in different ways.

Regardless of the methodology used, Waterfall or Agile,

effectively defining and managing requirements is
integral to the success of the final product.

In a Waterfall project, the majority of requirements are gathered at the beginning of the project. The
intention is that, with everything defined upfront, everyone will know what to do throughout the
development process. The primary problem with Waterfall methodology is the timeline – it could take
months or years to deliver a software product to the end-user. There is a level of uncertainty that cannot
be predicted when a product takes this long to develop. In addition, the people who develop requirements
are not the product developers – business and compliance stakeholders cannot accurately represent the
product use case without continuous insight from the domain experts.

In Agile, the requirements are not fully determined up front. Instead, a broad scope of the product is defined
upfront, and then in each iteration the team analyzes the requirements that supported each iteration of the
release. A key difference between gathering Agile and Waterfall requirements is that the end-user gets the
result of a release much faster. Progress can be adequately assessed, and more accurate requirements can
be defined throughout the release. Furthermore, releases are worked on in smaller teams that are made up
of all organizational stakeholders, therefore the requirements being created are not only more feasible to
develop, but also more accurate.

While Agile has the potential to speed up product delivery through an iterative approach to requirements
definition and management, most organizations have not fully transitioned from Waterfall. A likely reason
for this is that business and compliance stakeholders are reluctant to change, and as a result create
misalignment within the organization. Alignment between all organizational functions is critical to the
success of your final product, which ultimately stems from the requirements definition and management
phases of your release.

How To Overcome Modern Software Challenges With Requirements 4

Managing Requirements
Effectively Is The Greatest
Challenge For Large Organizations
Managing Business Compliance
is Extremely Complex
Achieving, maintaining, and proving compliance
requires coordinated efforts across multiple
teams with specific skills and knowledge about
governance, risk, and compliance. All of which
are interdependent and complex. Regulations
and policies are difficult to interpret, risk must
be managed, and audit requirements have to be
accurate across the organization.
Project, System, and Regional
Teams Take Siloed Approaches
Requirements impact multiple teams with an
organization. While organizations strive to
define a standardized approach to requirements
management, the problem is that ultimately teams
operate in silos and remain focused on their own
goals. Because each team works in silos, they also
are left to interpret the requirements on their own,
which results misinterpreted requirements and
more rework.
How To Overcome Modern Software Challenges With Requirements
Regulations, Policies, and
Guidelines Change
Managing the impact of regulatory change causes
a huge strain on compliance requirements. They
demand special attention due to the severity of
the potential consequences of non-compliance.
Not only is it difficult to understand the impact of
the regulatory change, but it is even more difficult
to understand them when multiple regulations
emerge or change at the same time. Throughout
the product release, regulatory changes must be
accommodated which ultimately leads to delays
and increased costs.
Teams Are Not Doing
Enough Analysis
Given the complexity of product requirements
and the distributed nature of large organizations,
analyzing changes, assessing impacts, and
identifying potential solutions is time-intensive.
Teams often underestimate the effort needed,
which increases the risk of getting them wrong.
They also reduce the likelihood of identifying
opportunities to leverage work across systems or
projects.
5
Bridging the
Requirements Gap from
Your Agile ALM Tool

Although many organizations are already using Agile ALM tools like Jira, Rally, and VersionOne to help
support their Agile transformation, we often hear that those tools alone are not doing enough to support the
organization. In a recent survey conducted by Blueprint, we asked users what capabilities their ALM tool was
lacking, and they said:

Challenges Faced By Blueprint Customers

Prior to Storyteller Adoption
An inability to coordinate delivery across
multiple teams, groups, and departments 58%
38%
Defects and/or costly late-stage rework 29%
22%
18%
A slow time to market 18%
7%
Source: TechValidate survey of 55 users of Blueprint Validated Published: June 14, 2019 TVID: C4D-8F2-05D

Requirements inputted into Agile ALM tools tend to be inconsistent, difficult to understand, and not
reflective of the business needs. They have a narrow view of the organization and are typically focused on
the development team. As a result, they cannot effectively develop requirements since the teams are still
misaligned and work from different tools. The development team can only see functional requirements;
however, they need access to the enterprise context which includes non-functional requirements to
effectively develop a product.

To get the most use out of your Agile ALM tools, you need to bridge the gap between your development
stakeholders and other organizational stakeholders like business and compliance. By doing this, you will be
able to produce requirements that accurately represents the end-user needs.

How To Overcome Modern Software Challenges With Requirements 6

Why You Should Consider
Your Enterprise Context

A key reason why organizations are having a hard time developing successful requirements in Agile is
because they are lacking context. With Agile ALM tools, you only get a glimpse of the product requirements
that matter to you, missing out on how those requirements fit into the bigger picture. This challenge is
amplified for larger, more complex, and regulated enterprise initiatives. Furthermore, when information is
only stored/shared within one team it often gets lost, which leads to missed requirements, inconsistent work,
and mistakes in development.

Enterprise context is critical when

crafting effective requirements
because they take into consideration
not only the functional requirements
but also the non-functional ones too.
So, IT stakeholders get a more
holistic view and understanding of
what the end-user expects,
therefore the product they
deliver will be more valuable.

For organizations who expect to deliver high-quality products, Agile ALM tools are not enough. To deliver
better requirements to your stakeholders, you need a tool that goes beyond the functional requirements and
includes the enterprise context. Storyteller aligns the work being done by the development team beyond just
user stories and epics, expanding it to regulatory obligations, business value streams, business strategy, and
so much more. In order to bridge the requirements gap from your Agile ALM tool, you must expand past the
development context and look deeper into the enterprise context.

How To Overcome Modern Software Challenges With Requirements 7

How To Avoid the Bottleneck
and Deliver Better
Requirements, Faster

Large organizations have to manage the challenges addressed above, but with their current processes this
is a very difficult task. For large-scale projects, business leaders need tools that are designed to manage your
requirements effectively.

Organizations can remove the requirements bottleneck whilst simultaneously improving their quality by
adopting tools that automate the process and enable seamless cross-functional collaboration. Here are the
top three reasons business leaders should consider a specialized requirements management software:

These three pillars of requirements management solutions

drive the greatest value for enterprise organizations:

Visual Collaboration
As we revealed earlier, complex IT projects generate requirements at a scale that cannot be
effectively managed by Agile ALM tools. Developers, team leaders, Business Analysts, and
CTOs need a better way to quickly find specific requirements and see them in enterprise
context. Visual collaboration enables stakeholders to gain an enterprise-wide view of the
product and its requirements. This ensures that requirements are properly monitored,
managed, and reviewed throughout the entire development lifecycle.

Data Unification and Centralization

Development is an evolving process and because of the interconnectedness of all the moving
parts, some of these changes need to be revised. A successful requirements management
process allows teams to scan through changes that have been made so that they can be
properly addressed. Data unification and centralization is critical because it aligns documents,
tools, and people.

Agile Automation
Many product releases never see the light of day. With so much investment in time,
personnel, and resources, team leaders need to be able to stay focused on the upfront goals
defined instead of getting mired in the complexities of the process. Agile automation enables
stakeholders to automate manual tasks and focus on more strategic and forward thinking.
Furthermore, Agile automation helps create a standardized process, so work is managed
more efficiently.

How To Overcome Modern Software Challenges With Requirements 8

Revolutionize Your Requirements
Management Practice With
Automation

Central to a successful requirements management program overhaul is the alignment of your business,
IT, and compliance functions. Ultimately, all of these stakeholders have the same goal in mind and the
requirements affect them all in similar ways. Access to predefined, validated, and reusable requirements will
significantly improve the definition and management processes.

To simplify the transition, much of the information that is needed by each stakeholder group can be
automated with an enterprise-class Agile software tool like Storyteller. Storyteller enables your team
members to collaborate in one place while effectively managing requirements in an enterprise focused
environment. It automates everything from your user stories, to functional tests, acceptance tests,
intelligent recommendations, document generation, and integrations.

Automating your requirements management removes process bottlenecks that your organization has
been struggling with for many years! It’ll enable your teams to focus on delivering products that provide the
greatest benefit to the end user, without spending countless hours on rework. Automation enables cross-
functional alignment because everything is delivered in a language that all team members understand.

Storyteller automatically integrates with tools like Jira, Rally, and VersionOne. As we mentioned earlier, these
tools alone cannot sufficiently support your large-scale projects, so Storyteller’s automatically generated
user stories are synced with your ALM tools whenever they’re created. There is no downtime, and your
developers can immediately get to work!

With easy access to predefined, validated, reusable, and

automated requirements, teams have the power to:

Accelerate Deliver reliable, Achieve and Reinforce process Retain and refine
requirements high-quality, maintain compliance adoption valuable enterprise
delivery and consistent throughout the knowledge
requirements SDLC

How To Overcome Modern Software Challenges With Requirements 9

About Blueprint
Blueprint is a Gartner-recognized Agile planning and compliance
management software vendor that is headquartered in Toronto,
Canada and has business units across North America and
Europe. Storyteller, Blueprint’s leading Agile planning and
compliance management platform, helps enterprise
organizations in regulated industries to drive alignment
between business, compliance and development
stakeholders throughout complex development
cycles in order to deliver high-value and compliant
product releases significantly faster, and at
vastly reduced cost and exposure to risk.

2019 Blueprint Software, Inc. All rights reserved. All product and company names and marks
mentioned in this document are the property of their respective owners.

How To Overcome Modern Software Challenges With Requirements 10