RAMP: Requirements Authors Mentoring Program
John Terzakis, Sarah C. Gregory · 2016
In a previous case study and paper, data was presented indicating that requirements training alone was not sufficient to achieve a high-quality requirements set. Mentoring of requirements authors by a requirements Subject Matter Expert (SME) was necessary. The requirements SME provided constructive and detailed feedback on defects in the requirements and then assisted the author with rewrites to remove them. This iterative process produced high-quality requirements but only after multiple revisions of requirements sets. The technique works well if there are only a few authors. However, what happens when there are dozens or hundreds of requirements authors? One requirements SME cannot possibly mentor that many authors. This paper presents the answer to this problem: the Requirements Authors Mentoring Program or RAMP. RAMP pairs a network of trained, site-based requirements SMEs with requirements authors. The details of how this network of SMEs was recruited, trained and impacted the quality of requirements on an Intel project are presented.