By: Simone Bernardi, Anders Ekman, Celeris AB
Continuous Delivery
The best companies recognized the link between organizational performance and IT delivery. Organized via SAFe structures, based on a set of company’s products, in continuous development and evolution to cope with the market. Employees face a continuously evolving products’ environment, where multiple colleagues work on previous, current, and future versions of the same product. In a continuous development environment, as empirically analysed by Forsgren and Humble (2016), having an efficient version control system in place is a key success factor, together with test automation, and continuous integration. Understanding which product’s version you are facing can avoid misunderstanding, sunk cost, and duplication of work.
Step 4 – Requirements Version Control
Same as in the IT delivery, version control assumes an important role in regulatory management. Regulatory requirements get usually released and updated over time (due to consultations with the industry, politicians, and various associations and regulatory bodies). Regulatory professionals, business, and IT departments are requested to adopt new and evolving regulations via continuous deployment. Regulations are interpreted by local regulators and regulatory experts within the organization. Interpretations evolve over time and new versions of the regulations are released.
Company’s employees and product owners need to cope with this set of evolving requirements and require access and transparency about the version of regulatory requirements they are facing. Lack of transparency on version control can easily cause duplication of work, sunk costs, as well as errors in product’s development. Have you ever been asked to sign off on a version of requirements which was not the most recent one? Or worked unconsciously on a version that did not contain recent updates done by another colleague or department? Or asked to find a specific version of a requirement or document and being uncertain when finding multiple copies / versions of the same? Efficient and easy to use excel, word, and powerpoint documents are often flying around within organizations, preventing professionals for a traceable, transparent, and easy access to proper versions of requirements and documents. Professional requirements management software help large, sophisticated organization to cope with the complexity of regulatory requirements and obtaining control over their version to ease transparency and avoid sunk costs.
References: Forsgren, N., J. Humble (2016). "The Role of Continuous Delivery in IT and Organizational Performance." In the Proceedings of the Western Decision Sciences Institute (WDSI) 2016, Las Vegas, NV.Source: Seven steps toward regulatory excellence – Step 4 – Requirements Version Control | LinkedIn
