- Definitions and Terminology
- Why Do Triage?
- Basic Triage Techniques
Why Do Triage?
In an attempt to do just enough requirements management, you may be tempted to dispense with triage. After all, most organizations don’t do it, anyway. And it is difficult to do. Furthermore, in most companies, development, finance, and marketing rarely get along with each other. So why bother? The answer lies in the fact that most systems built today do not meet customer expectations. Perhaps the lack of triage is the very reason for this. Not doing triage guarantees that your organization is taking huge risks: the risk of satisfying the wrong requirements, the risk of promising to meet a schedule only to miss it significantly, the risk of agreeing to satisfy requirements for a given budget only to exceed it significantly, and so on.
Performing triage is the most effective way to achieve just enough requirements management. It is triage that enables the rest of system development to proceed on schedule while still providing a quality product. Not performing triage is not an option. If you do not do it explicitly, it will occur implicitly. And if performed implicitly, you are leaving the success of your project to pure chance.