RAMP: Requirements Authors Mentoring Program
Industry data indicates that untrained and inexperienced requirements authors commonly inject thirty to fifty major defects per page of text. With many requirements specifications reaching several hundred pages, potentially thousands of defects are injected into the software development process. John Terzakis says training and mentoring of authors by a requirements coach is effective in reducing defect densities by an order of magnitude—when each coach is assigned only a few authors, they are collocated and, most importantly, experienced requirements coaches are available. So what happens if there are dozens of authors spread across multiple geographical sites and there are no requirements coaches at those sites? The Requirements Authors Mentoring Program (RAMP) provides the solution. John shares how a network of site-based requirements apprentices were recruited, trained to be coaches, and then assigned to requirements authors in their geographic region. John provides details on the defect detection and removal training, key success factors, and results from an actual Intel project. Learn how your organization can establish RAMP, which is applicable to both waterfall and agile software development lifecycles.
John Terzakis has more than thirty years of experience developing, writing, and testing software. With Intel for eighteen years, John is a systems engineer specializing in requirements engineering. He works with architects and engineers to help specify, improve, verify, and manage requirements for Intel’s next generation cellular modem products. He is a certified Intel instructor for the internal requirements engineering courses. John’s prior experience includes director and manager roles with Shiva, Racal InterLan, and Dataproducts. He was a member of the technical staff at Bell Labs. John is a Fellow with the International Academy, Research and Industry Association.