ABSTRACT
Alex looked up sharply. “Have all your projects come in on time in the last couple of years?” he asked, “or have there been any that slipped?” “Well, we are getting pretty good at predicting the development time needed. There have been a few occasions when Marcus has given us a hard time, but it’s generally not really been our fault; the requirements have changed in midstream.” “What was the worst slippage?” “Well, I guess last June, when we got the first release of the new system for handling e-mail acceptance of repair quotes into prerelease test before someone pointed out that a manager approval step was missing; it had never been captured in the requirements review.” “Didn’t your people know it was done that way?” “No; it had been in a manual part of the process, so we knew nothing about it, and didn’t know to ask the right questions. We had to rework a significant part of the workflow design because just sticking the extra step in would have violated the response requirements. We missed the release target by over a month.”
