Brief: Software Requirements Practices Are Ripe For Disruption

Agile approaches and continuous delivery have improved software development, testing, and delivery capabilities, but many organizations find their requirements practices continue to be a source of waste and frustration. Requirements that are implemented but never used, or used only long enough to determine that they don't satisfy needs, are costly and time-consuming to develop and test, deliver no business value, and potentially damage customer satisfaction and goodwill. Many approaches have been proposed, but often don't move the needle, including: use cases, rapid application development (RAD), joint application development (JAD), and UI prototyping, among others. The problem lies not just in how requirements are gathered and documented, but also in who provides the inputs. This report discusses how new approaches, made possible by continuous delivery, combined with user experience (UX) techniques, are disrupting traditional software requirements approaches and providing development teams with a more certain means of delivering value.