Everyone knows the old adage of “if you do what you’ve always done then you’ll get what you’ve always got.” It’s been attributed to many people over time, Albert Einstein, Henry Ford and Mark Twain to name but a few. No matter who first uttered those words, the point is that if you really want to change the results that you’re getting, you need to change the way you do things. The issue, however, is that it is human nature to resist change. On some sub-conscious level, there is a belief that when you’ve been doing something a particular way for some time, or you’ve been taught by your ‘superior’ that this is the best way, it must be a good way to do things. Even more so, the longer you’ve been doing it that way, the better it is. It takes a brave person to buck the trend and history is littered with people who tried and failed, which all goes to bolster the belief that “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.” The fact is that many of those failures were doomed from the start as they never really had the commitment, trust and conviction of their supporting infrastructures. Dipping a toe in isolated waters rather than taking the plunge.

Occasionally, someone dares to do something differently and they revolutionise the world.

As a sales person, who has been involved with leading edge products and promoting change, I consider this frequently.

I’ve been lucky enough to be involved with some very smart individuals who have dared to be different and I have worked for companies that have launched breakthrough technologies such as cellular with Vodafone and recently with Truphone and their revolutionary roaming SIM cards; Unix computing and the advent of graphical user interfaces (GUIs) with Team Systems and KCIT. With hindsight, it is glaringly obvious how these various products could help individuals and businesses and today they are ubiquitous items that you wouldn’t think twice about owning and using. However, back then, convincing someone about the potential benefits of a mobile phone before the network was fully operational was a different story. (If you’re reading this Ali Hopkins, Dick Alderson, Deep Bassi, John Morrison, Chris Gorman - who are among the best sales people I’ve been fortunate enough to work with - you’ll smile remembering selling a £3,000 phone that had 20-minute talk time, weighed more than a bag of sugar, would rip your suit jacket if you tried to put it in your pocket and only worked in isolated spots around London if the sun was out and you were pointing in the right direction!)

In a technology start-up business in particular, it’s the sales person’s job to try to convince a business to implement change; to embrace a new, untried, untested product and/or methodology and it is bloody hard work! When you’re selling a ‘me too’ product or service, the challenge is not about convincing someone that you can help change the way they do things for the better, more that your business does it better than your competitors, be it cheaper, faster, with better service etc. Getting someone to change the fundamental way they work is altogether a different proposition.

It is common sense that implementing a new piece of technology, unless it is a legal requirement, should give you a positive return on investment. The implementation should also go alongside an improvement in the processes and procedures of the business, making your business more efficient and effective and lowering your costs. But this is change and, with new technology, it is also fear of the unknown. There aren’t reference cases or testimonials to support your decision.

This brings me to where I am today and the industry I’m involved in; embedded software. The embedded world has a problem, but it’s a problem that has been there since its inception and therefore, it has ceased to be a problem as such and has become business as usual. An occupational hazard. It’s the elephant in the room that everyone has decided to ignore; the King's new clothes.

Figure 1.

It is a fact that around 70 percent of the defects introduced in to an embedded software system are introduced when writing requirements. This is because requirements are still largely written in natural language and, until now, tools haven’t been available for Systems Engineers, Systems Architects and Requirements Engineers to use to verify and validate that their requirements are error free. Not only that, but how can they know that the requirements actually describe the behaviour that they intended. They have had to rely on manual inspection and despite the undoubted talents of the people involved, there is no way that they can detect all of the ambiguous, missing or conflicting requirements that have been introduced.

The result is the following, very well-known graph.

Figure 2.

In the software world, everyone knows that the earlier you find and fix an error, the cheaper it is. As I stated earlier, this is not new. It has been around ever since software was first written. However, the majority of the focus on removing errors has, to date, been on all areas of the development cycle except for the requirements.

So, why have the requirements been ignored? Why, when it is so obvious that most errors are introduced here and it is the earliest part of the development cycle, where it is most cost effective to fix errors, has no one considered applying more focus to this area?

Part of the reason had been the complexity in creating something that could do the job. The main driver however, is the way requirements have been written, validated and managed, has been done the same way for so long that there is a common belief that this is the best way to do it and therefore to change it would be madness.

The technology now exists to address the elephant in the requirements' room, but it will need some brave individuals and some forward-thinking companies to take the plunge; be the first to buy that mobile phone, use an Apple Mac with it’s GUI or implement a Unix operating system.

www.argosim.com/product-videos/

Remember, if you do what you’ve always done, then you'll get what you’ve always got.