Coverage: How Much is Enough?
An anonymous business analyst or architect developing a Salesforce solution wrote the following on Elements.cloud confessions:
Had to rewrite a bunch of stories because the person who created them didn’t capture all of the requirements and actually left a bunch of open questions before they were assigned out.
Software solutions often fail when they do not cover enough user needs. The Project Management's Institute Pulse of the Profession® (2017) found that 39% of surveyed organizations reported inaccurate requirements gathering as a primary cause for project failure. They did not accurately cover customer needs within the project scope.
The Elements.cloud confessor found him/herself on the path to solution failure. The confession refers to user stories, which describe what a user does with a solution in a specific case, and why. The original user story author did not cover enough of the user needs. In this case, the confessor checked the user stories and presumably asked a lot of critical questions. S/he went back to discover the user needs and rewrote or created new user stories to ensure they covered the project’s scope.
Salesforce requires Apex developers build unit tests that cover at least 75% of their Apex code in a release. The release must pass all of those tests before the code can go into production. What percentage of customer needs should a Business Analyst or Architect discover to design a solution?
Ideally, you want to discover all of the user needs within the solution scope. Stakeholders rarely have enough time, energy and attention to reach that goal. They rarely think of everything they need from a new solution. If your solution replaces an existing solution, the stakeholders may not recall everything that your replacement solution should cover. Upcoming posts in this blog will show you how to get closer to ideal coverage.
Discover as many customer needs as possible and decide which ones will cover your solution scope.
The Business Analyst, Architect, and stakeholders should at least discover the downside of uncovered needs. Those needs may not be worth fulfilling in the current scope, making the risk acceptable. If you develop solutions for a regulated industry, you need to have 100% coverage of regulatory requirements.
Please share any cases where you completely covered a customer’s needs and delivered the solution they expected. If you have a story where you suffered the consequences of not covering customer needs, please share that as well. We also welcome your questions, suggestions and challenges in the comments below.