Regular readers of the blog, and there are getting to be close to 100 of you I think, will have seen my rants on requirements management as a solution for business agility before.
Over on ComputerWorld today I saw another article on companies trying to deliver what their users want by improving requirements management - In Depth: IT Looks to Halt Clashes Between Users, Developers. Now I don't have anything particularly against managing requirements better and I certainly applaud any attempt by anyone to get users and developers on the same page. That said two things need to be made clear:
- Business rules are not like other requirements (see these book reviews for more)
- Changing business rules are what cause most problems in systems maintenance/evolution (see the whole section on business agility)
Getting better at managing technical requirements like performance and UI design will help. Getting the business and IT to collaborate in the definition of the business rules that drive the system might actually solve the problem.
