Rolf Goetz

I’m an INTJ-type engineer who focuses on value delivered, goals reached and requirements met. I lead stakeholders to a deeper understanding of what they value, and I lead people to provide that value by the right process and the right products.

In the software development project used to do the case study I played the role of an (internal) consultant to the sponsor and his team of subject matter experts. Each of these SMEs was an expert in one area, while the others had only basic understanding of this area. The group of business analysts, designers and QA personnel was completely incompetent in the subject matter at the start of the project. Somebody proposed specification reviews to distribute knowledge among the whole group, and I added to try Lean Inspections before the reviews. So we did. I taught the team Lean Inspections and conducted the study.

I care for real excellence, not just at my current gig as Head of Requirements Engineering at Haufe Group in Freiburg, Germany.

Lean Inspections

I’d like to inform participants about a powerful, yet inexpensive way of bridging the communications gaps between stakeholders, requirements engineers (business analysts), and development team. Reviews come to mind, because reviewers learn from reviewed material as a secondary effect. However, reviews are very expensive. The combination of Extreme Inspections and classical Reviews on requirements specifications is an efficient method to arrive at a good shared understanding of the subject matter domain in general, and of the requirements in particular.

The audience should walk away with two important findings:

1) It is crucial to put Inspections before Reviews, because otherwise unclear specifications will be distributed and will lead to confusion. I’ll present hard data to support that claim.

2) Despite the extra step of adding Inspections, the overall ROI of the effort is excellent (about 4:1, as I will demonstrate using case study data).

Slides Video

Workshop—Lean Inspections

Goal

Preparing the attendants to successfully do Reviews and Inspections, in a lean and agile way

Intro

Reviews and Inspections carry the disadvantage of being very time-consuming and somehow difficult.

We will address these issues and in doing so arrive at a lean way to do Inspections which is very well suited for agile projects. Side effect: zero defects, if you are serious about it (no joke).