Semantic Werks

Interesting cover story from CIO magazine on requirements. The article covers the various requirements black holes and outlines some strategies for avoiding them: agile methods, tight integration with process, high-level frameworks. It’s interesting to see this issue from the CIO perspective (who surely have the most to gain from a good solution to this problem). There are also some great links to various requirements tools that are worth investigating.

Along the same lines, I went to a presentation today from some researchers from IBM Japan. The lead researcher, Mayumi Itakura, had some fascinating results from industrial studies in Japan.  Her data showed for the cases she studied (32, I think), the successful projects spent 50% of time on requirements definition, and 40% of the effort.  I wonder what the more general numbers might be (is there a difference in the way Japan and North America do software projects)?