Where Does Your Team Fall On The Requirements Continuum?

Regardless of methodology used only 15% of product teams indicate that they benefit from consistently actionable requirements. Nearly two-thirds of survey responders indicate that requirements either are usually (51.43%) or are consistently (14.86%) at the right level of detail and actionable.

However, for a third, requirements are subpar: 28.57% of responses reveal product teams that are struggling to produce adequately detailed and actionable requirements for the development team. Another 5.14% acknowledge that their requirements are never actionable nor at the right level of detail required (See Table 5).

2013 Survey Question

In 2012’s survey we asked a somewhat related question “Which aspects of the product development process do you believe your organization handles effectively?” What’s striking is that almost the exact number of respondents believed that their requirements process was a strength (14.24%).

2012 Survey Question

Not Much Has Changed

Over the last two years not much has changed when it comes to requirements. Approximately 15% of organizations continue to excel at the juncture where the rubber meets the road in the product development process. While the majority continue to strive for consistency. Over the same period our data shows that Agile adoption has exponentially increased but it appears the requirements challenge has not been significantly impacted – one way or another.