Pavlos's Thoughts

Here’s what I learned about requirements management after more than 15 years in the medical software industry.

Stop! Before you invest any time or money on requirements management, or any tools for that, you must solve these three problems. No, really! Don’t work on processes or tools until you fix these:

• Give your dev team a very clear, straightforward, down to earth picture of what you’re trying to build. You should be able to explain it in an hour and write it in a few pages. This must come from marketing, but everyone in the team should be able to relay it faithfully enough.
• Make sure everyone in the team actually believes this is happening! Check that they believe the project is going to take place, the time scale is sensible, it’s going to succeed, and that they personally are going to do it. If they don’t really believe some of that they’ll keep working, but won’t achieve success.
• Make it so that your people care personally about the product and its quality. If you’re building a consumer app like a game or website, make sure they use it. If it’s a profesional tool make sure they empathise with the specialist who is going to use it, and what the specialist is trying to achieve in the world.

The good news is, once you solve these three issues thoroughly, requirements management will be very easy. All you need is descriptions and categories. A document with chapters will do. If your project is large or has a long future (and not otherwise) use a database that gives you at least one level of nesting, so you can group related specs (user interface, back end, service & support, etc) together. That’s all you need. Write specs as simple facts about what the product does.

Write simple, positive statements in the present tense. Each spec item should be maybe a paragraph or half a page, up to 2-3 pages in rare cases. Do not write specs for novices! Even if you do, and especially if you do, they’ll work like novices and give you correspondingly poor work. Write specs for people proficient in the domain. If your developers are actually domain novices, fix that. You need to train them by giving a series of seminars, immersion, or whatever is effective training. Do not train them or hand-hold them through spec!

For software projects you’ll need an issue tracker and a work tracker. These two must be the same tool. Otherwise it’s madness. If that tool is also your spec database, make sure that developers close their bugs or work items but don’t close your specs. You need the bugs and stories to go away never to come back. For your specs, the opposite.

When I say issue tracker, I mean the internal issue tracker used by the engineering team. That’s an engineering tool, and will routinely contain hundreds if not thousands of issues. You need another issue tracker, such as Salesforce, for your external, field reported or customer service issues. These must not be the same tool. You need real people to carry issues and resolutions, manually, from one to the other.

Now, there is one aspect of requirements management that’s hard to do, and all the systems I’ve seen so far either didn’t support it as a feature, or were complicated and horrible. The one difficult aspect of requirements management is:

Knowing what features exist in which version of the product.

That’s hard. Effective, simple requirement management tools, starting with plain old documents, are effective and simple when they describe “it”. The thing that you’re making. The product. As soon as you stop describing “it” and you start trying to describe that the feature appeared in version 3, but was reworked in 5 and eventually scrapped in 6 it gets really complicated and nobody wants to read it any more.

The best I can recommend is don’t try to track specs for multiple versions but branch, export etc. your specs so that the specs of old versions become mostly frozen and describe what “it” was at the time. Or, if you must keep the specs concurrent, make an “applies to” table that tells you whether the spec applies to each version or edition and accept that most cells will contain the value “unknown”.

It’s time to have one operating system, and it will be Android. Yes, on everything. Google’s world domination will succeed.

There are two sets of things an OS does. It’s a user interface, app sandbox, and hardware abstraction. Android does these really, really well. It’s a fresh UI for fingers rather than mice. It’s the first to offer proper sandboxed security, so we can install apps written by random strangers, like we wanted to do since the 80s. It runs on everything and it’s free.

The other job of an OS is to be a deployment target for apps. A few years ago, the bulk and complexity of these APIs ensured the dominance of Windows. Now, the lock is breaking. Software is becoming a service. You don’t buy software, you download the app to access the service, or it’s just a Web page. Legacy software like Microsoft Office can run in VMs, or in the cloud.

I use a Mac today. Right now, it’s a better UI and sandbox than Windows. Last week in Japan I saw an ASUS two-piece Android laptop, where the screen detaches to be a tablet. As soon as Android gets a good form-factor and matures enough to run Windows VMs painlessly I’m switching to it, and so is everyone else!

Microsoft is sort of failing at the OS game. It holds business users and hardcore gamers, the two groups who use heavyweight apps, but the average customer has no reason to want a Windows PC. Apple could do all that Android does, but it decided to have no more than 10% share if the PC market – to get more it has to license the OS.

The new lock-in is not the CPU, since Intel won that one, and it’s not the bulk of the API either. Customers won’t invest in apps any more, only service providers will. The new lock is user identity – your Google account. Google fought that battle brilliantly and won.

All leadership involves a kind of lying. Attack and we’ll prevail over our enemies. Work hard on this product and we’ll succeed. Join our growing community. When the leader says these things, success does not yet exist. The act of leading produces an image of success and of a path to it. The many enthusiastic acts of following create the success. If too few people follow, or follow in a very half-hearted manner, there will be defeat, failure, or no community.

Selling is not like this. To sell is to convince someone of the value of a thing that you have, so that you can exchange it favorably. You have to have the thing, and it has to deliver the value readily by itself. Great selling acknowledges this. Buy a Mac, it can do these things out of the box. The cardinal sin of selling is to sell things that don’t deliver the value that is claimed. Drink Coke and you’ll feel happy. Really? That could only be honest selling for drugs. Otherwise it’s very uninspiring leadership. If you’re active and outgoing, do fun things with others, and also drink Coke, you’ll feel happiness.

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Apple marketing
Hey, we understand you. You want a laptop to do these five or six things, right? Here, we’ve built one for you that’s very attractive and well-made and does the things that you want really, really well.

Microsoft marketing
You don’t really know what you want from your PC, and neither do we. We’re all in the same boat! So we made this software that has a whole bunch of features. Put it in your PC and it’ll do things. By the way your friends all have it, so if you go with the flow you’ll be able to share stuff.

Open Source marketing
User! You have no idea what you need and we’re not even going to attempt to tell you. Behind this link is our latest software, which we’re very proud of. If you use it, maybe you will see…

Guess who wins… [...]

There’s around six things that motivate us through life.

Pleasure
We seek physical pleasure. Sex, food, music and dance, or anything that gives a bodilly sense of intense pleasure. We’re wired for it in obvious and direct ways. What’s remarkable about pleasure is marginalized it is in our society. We build the world around us but we don’t build it for pleasure. In your city you might find pleasure in a brothel or a spa, or in a nightclub that’s devoted to adult pleasure. These are seen as indulgences, at best. You might find some dilute, socially acceptable pleasure in a great restaurant, in music, or at the gym.

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Pavlos’s Thoughts – Episode 1 – The Apple tablet and what they should have built instead

Talking post (podcast). Click to open as MP3.

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