Page 184 - Software and Systems Requirements Engineering in Practice

150 S o f t w a r e & S y s t e m s R e q u i r e m e n t s E n g i n e e r i n g : I n P r a c t i c e

To document an issue, record

• Name A short phrase
• Brief description One or two sentences
• Factors involved Names of, and links to, the factors that
conflict with each other to create this issue.
• Why it’s hard The challenges facing the project team; e.g.,
meeting functionality, schedule, budget, schedule, quality,
performance constraints.
• Expert The subject matter expert
• Owner, status, priority, etc. The usual requirements
management attributes
• Discussion Additional information that came up when the
issue was uncovered. This may include potential strategies
for resolving the issue, before the strategies have been
separately documented.
Sometimes, an issue is identified that does not seem to reflect a
conflict between factors. That’s okay. Document it first, and figure out
the factor conflicts later.

• If you’re lucky, thinking about what makes the issue hard
will suggest a new factor.
• Sometimes the factor conflict won’t become apparent until
you consider the architectural alternatives surrounding the
issue.
• If nothing else, there will usually be a conflict with cost and/
or schedule.
• Or, it may turn out that something that appeared to be difficult
didn’t really make a difference to the architecture after all.
Strategies
A strategy is a proposed decision that addresses one or more significant
issues. Many strategies are simply architectural design decisions, such
as the decision to implement asynchronous communication using
loosely coupled event channels instead of tighter-coupled publishers
and subscribers. However, in global analysis, an issue can involve
both technical and managerial factors, and so the strategy may be
technical, managerial, or a combination. For example, if the issue is
“ASP programming is best done in Java for this product, but our
programmers only know C++,” the architect and the project manager
could choose to “retrain our programmers in JSP,” “buy an ASP
development environment for C++,” or “use some C++ programmers
to write C++ applets, and retrain others to write JSP.”