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Unneeded requirements implemented in Waterfall & Agile

Derek Jones from The Shape of Code

Software does not wear out, but the world in which it runs evolves. Time and money is lost when, after implementing a feature in software, customer feedback is that the feature is not needed.

How do Waterfall and Agile implementation processes compare in the number of unneeded feature/requirements that they implement?

In a Waterfall process, a list of requirements is created and then implemented. The identity of ‘dead’ requirements is not known until customers start using the software, which is not until it is released at the end of development.

In an Agile process, a list of requirements is used to create a Minimal Viable Product, which is released to customers. An iterative development processes, driven by customer feedback, implements requirements, and makes frequent releases to customers, which reduces the likelihood of implementing known to be ‘dead’ requirements. Previously implemented requirements may be discovered to have become ‘dead’.

An analysis of the number of ‘dead’ requirements implemented by the two approaches appears at the end of this post.

The plot below shows the number of ‘dead’ requirements implemented in a project lasting a given number of working days (blue/red) and the difference between them (green), assuming that one requirement is implemented per working day, with the discovery after 100 working days that a given fraction of implemented requirements are not needed, and the number of requirements in the MVP is assumed to be small (fractions 0.5, 0.1, and 0.05 shown; code):

Dead requirements for Waterfall and Agile projects running for a given number of days, along with difference between them.

The values calculated using one requirement implemented per day scales linearly with requirements implemented per day.

By implementing fewer ‘dead’ requirements, an Agile project will finish earlier (assuming it only implements all the needed requirements of a Waterfall approach, and some subset of the ‘dead’ requirements). However, unless a project is long-running, or has a high requirements’ ‘death’ rate, the difference may not be compelling.

I’m not aware of any data on rate of discovery of ‘dead’ implemented requirements (there is some on rate of discovery of new requirements); as always, pointers to data most welcome.

The Waterfall projects I am familiar with, plus those where data is available, include some amount of requirement discovery during implementation. This has the potential to reduce the number of ‘dead’ implemented requirements, but who knows by how much.

As the size of Minimal Viable Product increases to become a significant fraction of the final software system, the number of fraction of ‘dead’ requirements will approach that of the Waterfall approach.

There are other factors that favor either Waterfall or Agile, which are left to be discussed in future posts.

The following is an analysis of Waterfall/Agile requirements’ implementation.

Define:

F_{live} is the fraction of requirements per day that remain relevant to customers. This value is likely to be very close to one, e.g., 0.999.
R_{done} requirements implemented per working day.

Waterfall

The implementation of R_{total} requirements takes I_{days}=R_{total}/R_{done}days, and the number of implemented ‘dead’ requirements is (assuming that the no ‘dead’ requirements were present at the end of the requirements gathering phase):

R_{Wdead}=R_{total}*(1-{F_{live}}^{I_{days}})

As I_{days} right infty effectively all implemented requirements are ‘dead’.

Agile

The number of implemented ‘live’ requirements on day n is given by:

R_n=F_{live}*R_{n-1}+R_{done}

with the initial condition that the number of implemented requirements at the start of the first day of iterative development is the number of requirements implemented in the Minimum Viable Product, i.e., R_0=R_{mvp}.

Solving this difference equation gives the number of ‘live’ requirements on day n:

R_n=R_{mvp}*{F_{live}}^n+{n*R_{done}}/{n(1-F_{live})+F_{live}}

as n right infty, R_n approaches to its maximum value of {R_{done}}/{1-F_{live}}

Subtracting the number of ‘live’ requirements from the total number of requirements implemented gives:

R_{Adead}=R_{mvp}+n*R_{done}-R_n

or

R_{Adead}=R_{mvp}(1-{F_{live}}^n)+n*R_{done}(1-1/{n(1-F_{live})+F_{live}})
or
R_{Adead}=R_{mvp}(1-{F_{live}}^n)+n*R_{done}{n-1}/{n+F_{live}/(1-F_{live})}

as n right infty effectively all implemented requirements are ‘dead’, because the number of ‘live’ requirements cannot exceed a known maximum.

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Finding patterns in construction project drawing creation dates

Derek Jones from The Shape of Code

I took part in Projecting Success‘s 13th hackathon last Thursday and Friday, at CodeNode (host to many weekend hackathons and meetups); around 200 people turned up for the first day. Team Designing-Success included Imogen, Ryan, Dillan, Mo, Zeshan (all building construction domain experts) and yours truly (a data analysis monkey who knows nothing about construction).

One of the challenges came with lots of real multi-million pound building construction project data (two csv files containing 60K+ rows and one containing 15K+ rows), provided by SISK. The data contained information on project construction drawings and RFIs (request for information) from 97 projects.

The construction industry is years ahead of the software industry in terms of collecting data, in that lots of companies actually collect data (for some, accumulate might be a better description) rather than not collecting/accumulating data. While they have data, they don’t seem to be making good use of it (so I am told).

Nearly all the discussions I have had with domain experts about the patterns found in their data have been iterative, brief email exchanges, sometimes running over many months. In this hack, everybody involved is sitting around the same table for two days, i.e., the conversation is happening in real-time and there is a cut-off time for delivery of results.

I got the impression that my fellow team-mates were new to this kind of data analysis, which is my usual experience when discussing patterns recently found in data. My standard approach is to start highlighting visual patterns present in the data (e.g., plot foo against bar), and hope that somebody says “That’s interesting” or suggests potentially more interesting items to plot.

After several dead-end iterations (i.e., plots that failed to invoke a “that’s interesting” response), drawings created per day against project duration (as a percentage of known duration) turned out to be of great interest to the domain experts.

Building construction uses a waterfall process; all the drawings (i.e., a kind of detailed requirements) are supposed to be created at the beginning of the project.

Hmm, many individual project drawing plots were showing quite a few drawings being created close to the end of the project. How could this be? It turns out that there are lots of different reasons for creating a drawing (74 reasons in the data), and that it is to be expected that some kinds of drawings are likely to be created late in the day, e.g., specific landscaping details. The 74 reasons were mapped to three drawing categories (As built, Construction, and Design Development), then project drawings were recounted and plotted in three colors (see below).

The domain experts (i.e., everybody except me) enjoyed themselves interpreting these plots. I nodded sagely, and occasionally blew my cover by asking about an acronym that everybody in the construction obviously knew.

The project meta-data includes a measure of project performance (a value between one and five, derived from profitability and other confidential values) and type of business contract (a value between one and four). The data from the 97 projects was combined by performance and contract to give 20 aggregated plots. The evolution of the number of drawings created per day might vary by contract, and the hypothesis was that projects at different performance levels would exhibit undesirable patterns in the evolution of the number of drawings created.

The plots below contain patterns in the quantity of drawings created by percentage of project completion, that are: (left) considered a good project for contract type 1 (level 5 are best performing projects), and (right) considered a bad project for contract type 1 (level 1 is the worst performing project). Contact the domain experts for details (code+data):

Number of drawings created at percentage project completion times.

The path to the above plot is a common one: discover an interesting pattern in data, notice that something does not look right, use domain knowledge to refine the data analysis (e.g., kinds of drawing or contract), rinse and repeat.

My particular interest is using data to understand software engineering processes. How do these patterns in construction drawings compare with patterns in the software project equivalents, e.g., detailed requirements?

I am not aware of any detailed public data on requirements produced using a waterfall process. So the answer is, I don’t know; but the rationales I heard for the various kinds of drawings sound as-if they would have equivalents in the software requirements world.

What about the other data provided by the challenge sponsor?

I plotted various quantities for the RFI data, but there wasn’t any “that’s interesting” response from the domain experts. Perhaps the genius behind the plot ideas will be recognized later, or perhaps one of the domain experts will suddenly realize what patterns should be present in RFI data on high performance projects (nobody is allowed to consider the possibility that the data has no practical use). It can take time for the consequences of data analysis to sink in, or for new ideas to surface, which is why I am happy for analysis conversations to stretch out over time. Our presentation deck included some RFI plots because there was RFI data in the challenge.

What is the software equivalent of construction RFIs? Perhaps issues in a tracking system, or Jira tickets? I did not think to talk more about RFIs with the domain experts.

How did team Designing-Success do?

In most hackathons, the teams that stay the course present at the end of the hack. For these ProjectHacks, submission deadline is the following day; the judging is all done later, electronically, based on the submitted slide deck and video presentation. The end of this hack was something of an anti-climax.

Did team Designing-Success discover anything of practical use?

I think that finding patterns in the drawing data converted the domain experts from a theoretical to a practical understanding that it was possible to extract interesting patterns from construction data. They each said that they planned to attend the next hack (in about four months), and I suggested that they try to bring some of their own data.

Can these drawing creation patterns be used to help monitor project performance, as it progressed? The domain experts thought so. I suspect that the users of these patterns will be those not closely associated with a project (those close to a project are usually well aware of that fact that things are not going well).