Major Telecommunications Company: System Requirements

Summary

Doreen Evans Associates assisted in developing over 40,000 requirements for a replacement system.

Client Company Profile

One of the world's leading providers of high-growth communications services and the largest provider of wireline and wireless communications in the United States, with more than 112 million access line equivalents and more than 27 million wireless customers. The company has more than 261,000 employees and $65 billion in 2000 revenues, the company’s global presence extends to 44 countries.

Business Challenge

The company needed to replace a mission-critical legacy system that provisioned equipment for telephone services. The goal in the first phase of the project was to replicate existing functionality while incorporating new technology; later phases would add enhancements to the system. Management realized the importance of developing solid requirements that could be traced to testing scripts, but there was a problem. No single source in the company understood all the functions that the current system offered. The objective was to develop a process that would bring together the knowledge of subject matter experts from across the country and capture the results in a requirements repository.

Solution

Because of the magnitude of the project (more than 75 participants over a 10-month period), DEA was engaged to help ensure success in discovering and documenting the requirements. Using best practices and based on experience, DEA defined a rigorous process to support the requirements-gathering effort for the project. Using a repository-based modeling tool was also critical to the success of the project. Without such a tool, the ability to manage the hundreds of requirements that were gathered would have been impossible. DEA customized the modeling tool to support the requirements-gathering process and wrote scripts that would automatically produce the requirement specification from the repository.

DEA worked with internal staff to define a set of requirements that would be used to generate user acceptance test scripts for the development and ongoing management of their mission-critical provisioning system. The team documented 40,000 requirements that were traced to functional testing scripts.

The requirements created during the initial 10-month project became the basis for ongoing change management and enhancement tracking and are used to this day. When a change request or enhancement request is received, the baselined requirements repository is opened and analyzed. Models that incorporate the proposed changes are built and then compared with the baseline. The comparison provides a means to estimate how large the development effort will be. Once accepted and approved, the new requirements are stored as the new baseline repository and a change history database is updated. Management has used this database to find out the volatility of particular business areas by examining which functions and which data entities have had change activity. The requirements have remained an active, living mechanism to guide maintenance and improvement of a vital system resource.