Stringent regulations and growing competition motivated the company to seek better requirements management processes
This Fortune 500 company’s products and services are powered by internally developed technologies that are designed to provide security, convenience, and a sense of confidence to its customers. With development teams, customers, and partners scattered across 100 countries, the customer’s software development process needs to run as smoothly as possible. An integral part of the company’s application development process is the elicitation, specification, and analysis of high-level business requirements submitted by its business partners. Requirements definition and management needs to be textual, visual, and collaboratively defined in order to ensure that everyone is on the same page regarding branding, loyalty programs, service options, and more.
The company had been using a variety of off the-shelf technologies, including Microsoft Word and Microsoft Excel, to manage all of its requirements. One Excel-based document was extremely critical to the company’s development process: It was the common vehicle for capturing all key requirements, and it also fed the company’s downstream testing tools to verify compliance to requirements.
Although the company’s development teams had been managing requirements with Word, Excel, and other standalone tools for the past 20 years, the company realized that more stringent government regulations and the company’s own internal growth objectives made this approach unsustainable. Increased competition, new online rivals, and the threat of commoditization were also pushing the need to deliver new products to market much more quickly.
The way the company managed requirements presented a number of challenges:
This Micro Focus customer is one of the most recognized global brands in the world, selling a diverse set of products and services to millions of clients and partners around the world. With millions of transactions processed each day, this customer needs to ensure that its employees are always listening and delivering to the changing needs of its multifaceted customer base.
This Fortune 500 company is relying on Micro Focus to orchestrate its requirements management process across its employees, partners, and customers. Over a thousand employees are involved in the initial phase of the project.
In addition to helping project teams, partners, and clients collaborate on requirements, Micro Focus can help ensure that all development teams learn from each other. While Agile development is starting to help the company develop products faster, it has limitations for teams trying to share best practices. Instead of having Agile teams start from scratch and figure out what user stories make sense for a client, Micro Focus helps both Agile and Waterfall teams look at what other teams have done and reuse requirements more easily – helping accelerate delivery of new products and services.
