I believe there is an opportunity for some significant improvements in the
way we manage our core product development. Whenever we finish an
update, my developers come to me with great ideas to improve the product.
These ideas are fresh in their minds because they just finished an update and
know where the trouble spots are. They often have good ideas about where we
need to work the product to make it more reusable to achieve real savings
during the next product update. Unfortunately, no one is listening to them
at this time. Then when it comes time to do the next round of updates to our
product, someone from Systems Engineering gets involved and spends significant
resources diddling in DOORS13 trying to come up with the
requirements for the next update. But unfortunately, the Systems Engineers
who are assigned don’t understand the products we use to achieve many of
the customer’s requirements. The way I see it, most of the work they end up
doing is just a rehash of old requirements and usually provides little real
value. We should be reusing more of the requirements and just making
updates that make sense from the customer perspective and where we know
we can improve the product. But unfortunately we spend huge sums of
money continually reinventing and diddling in DOORS and we don’t get
the value from this effort that we should because the Systems Engineers
aren’t talking to the developers who understand our products.