Software Requirements Engineering

Final Project

Submitted to:
Sir Ansar Bhatti
Submitted by:

Name: Roll Number:

Javeria Ijaz BSEF16M011
M. Sajawal Khan BSEF16M017
Aroob Kausar BSEF16M005
Rabiya Usman BSEF16M032
REQUIREMENT ENGINEERING
PROCESS

SWOT ANALYSIS REPORT

ON

NORTHBAY SOLUTIONS
1 ABSTRACT
This document is aimed at studying in detail, the Requirement Engineering process of a multinational
company named NorthBay Solutions, and provide with reasons, a Strengths Weaknesses
Opportunities Threats (SWOT) Analysis of the Requirement Engineering process, the company has
currently adopted, for the Final Project of Software Requirements Engineering course, offered to use
this semester. It is the result of an interview conducted together with one of NorthBay’s Project
Manager, Mr. Ansar Malook Bhatti. NorthBay develops a cloud-based platform that offers big data,
mobile and web enterprise solutions and works in partnership with the Amazon Web Services (AWS)
as one of their associates. This document tries to understand and analyze the most important aspects
of the Requirement Engineering process of each of the four components of SWOT Analysis, providing
a fair description as well as justification of categorizing every point in their respective headings.

2 INTRODUCTION

2.1 PURPOSE
The purpose of this document is to provide with a fair SWOT analysis of the chosen company,
NorthBay Solutions. It also expands and broadens the vision by portraying different aspects of the
company with respect to its Requirement Engineering process which comes as a food for thought to
everyone reading this document, to look for argumentative views presented in this document, which
can be questioned and discussed.

This document also enlightened us to think out of the box and to come up with a wide range of
arguments and reasoning, which helped us determine which feature or practice of the company
should be placed in which section of the SWOT analysis, which proved to be very productive, learning-
oriented and teamwork empowered activity as a whole.

2.2 SCOPE
This Postmortem Report solely gives detailed analysis of the aspects of the Strengths, Weaknesses,
Opportunities and Threats, NorthBay Solutions might encounter with. This report primarily targets the
company itself in order to verify with our findings and make alterations or upgrade and enhance their
Requirement Engineering Processes, if anything helpful is jolted down in the document. It also attracts
everyone with an urge to study the latest postmortem report of NorthBay Solutions’ Requirement
Engineering process and wants to know the flaws or bonus points, company is having in this regard.
Lastly, it also attracts anyone who wishes to observe and understand how a SWOT analysis report is
furnished and the structure and features of a document of similar type.
3 COMPANY’S DESCRIPTION

3.1 COMPANY’S OVERVIEW

NorthBay architects, designs and develops enterprise-class Mobile, Web, Social and Big Data solutions
for some of the world’s most innovative start-up companies. It also does it for some of the world’s
largest companies including the likes of EMC, Cisco, Ariba, Interwoven, PTC, PWC, TVGuide, St Paul
Travelers, Johns Hopkins, Duke University Law, Random House, Los Alamos National Laboratories, JP
Morgan, Deloitte & Reuters.

NorthBay is headquartered Cambridge, Massachusetts providing services and products to companies

across the globe serviced by our nearly 200 professionals. To repeatedly deliver excellence it launched
NorthBay University in early 2012 directly on the NorthBay campus. Each new NorthBay team member
spends the first 90 days of their career at NorthBay University solving real world problems. Most senior
team members refresh their skills at NBU as technology evolves and our customer needs change.

NorthBay helps its clients achieve time-to-market advantage, drive technology innovation, and gain
economical access to world-class software engineering resources globally. It drives its clients’ overall
effectiveness by delivering quality, on-time and economically, and providing quicker time-to-market.
Its customized solutions for clients have span numerous industries including healthcare, media,
mobile & social gaming, financial services, retail, technology, education, and publishing. NorthBay’s
in-house professionals include graphic designers, developers, information architects, project
managers, and usability specialists that work together to craft a strategy that is tailored to their
customer’s business goals.

3.2 CURRENT REQUIREMENT ENGINEERING PROCESS AT NORTHBAY

NorthBay Solutions is currently working in partnership with Amazon Web Services (AWS) to develop
projects in the fields of Big Data Analytics, DevOps, Cloud Migration and many more. They are working
as one of their project associates, so whenever a project arrives as AWS, on the basis of the ranking
of each of AWS’s associate partners, like Northbay, that project is assigned to a company. When a
project is assigned to NorthBay, negotiation and sales pitching is done. A project is won by showing
the previous projects done by the company and the current project it has on AWS Live.

NorthBay Solution works in Agile Project Development. As soon as a project arrives and is negotiated,
Statement of Work (SOW) is defined and the project is assigned to one of the Project Teams. Staffing
is then done within the team. Once all this is done, the process of Emergent (Elicitation) begins. A
session which is similar to a controlled workshop is held through Zoom Video conferencing tool
between the team and the customers. If the customer is unsure about what they want, Northbay also
provides them with services like Question Elaboration and white-boarding so the customer is aware
of what they really want. With the help of this Software Requirements Specification (SRS) document
is created.

With the creation of SRS document, all the requirements are assigned weights and prioritized with the
help from the customers. A Sprint Release Plan (SRP) is developed from these requirements, where a
Sprint is a period of 2 weeks in terms of Agile Development Mechanism, where something has to be
delivered after each sprint. SRP contains division of all the customer requirements within consecutive
sprints. The customer has SRP in hand before the development actually starts and they can choose
and modify it according to their needs, maintaining the logical sequence between them.
4 SWOT ANALYSIS
SWOT analysis is a strategic planning technique used to help a person or organization identify
strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats related to business competition or project planning.
It is intended to specify the objectives of the business venture or project and identify the internal and
external factors that are favorable and unfavorable to achieving those objectives.

Here we will try to present the SWOT analysis of the chosen company with respect to its Requirement
Engineering process specifically, that’ll help us understand in detail, the aspects of the company
related to the domain of the course under consideration, which is Software Requirements
Engineering.

4.1 STRENGTHS
This section provides with the identified strengths that NorthBay Solutions possesses. It also jolts
down the analysis done on each of the strengths and justifies why each of these strengths landed into
this particular section at the end of the day.

4.1.1 Truly and Literally Practices Agile

In Pakistan, very few organizations exist that practice the use of Agile technologies and
methodologies to the truest extents. This thing is also referred by Mr. Ansar as one of the
qualities of the organization which makes it stand out from all the common software houses
in Pakistan. Understanding the true Agile is really very important. Agile has its own unique
development structure which is different than traditional other development approaches.
Agile is iterative, it is adaptive and it is supported by some outstanding tools and techniques,
which NorthBay vows to possess and count this amongst its strengths.

4.1.2 Welcomes Changing Requirements

Agile methods are flexible to change. Northbay is currently working under Agile Sprint
Planning model where, according to Mr. Ansar, around 10-20% requirements are allowed to
change even after signoff of the SRS document while 80-90% of the requirements must stay
the same. This is one of the major strengths for the company as other models like the
Waterfall follow a very rigid pattern of unchangeable requirements. Companies, like
NorthBay, who follow Agile methodologies provide a flexibility to the customers which has
always been a necessity.

Customers are also allowed to alter the SRP and get requirements developed as per their own
wish which is something as tremendous as it sounds like. Boehm & Turner said that “changes
are an ally rather than an enemy. Change allows for more creativity and quicker value to the
customer”. (Boehm & Turner, 2005)
4.1.3 Provides Early Benefits to the Customer

As stated in the current RE process followed by NorthBay, an SRP document is created and
presented to the customer before the beginning of the actual development phase. This
enables the customer to in fact, have a full fledge clear picture of the whole development
phase and puts their trust into the organization.

Moreover, during the Emergent, if the customers are unsure about what they really want,
Northbay also provides them with services like Question Elaboration and white-boarding, by
showing them drawn models and diagrams via screen sharing about what they might be
willing to have. This process also helps the customer get done with the SRS document and
reduces the chances of requirement change in the future as well.

4.1.4 Maintains the Productivity of development

When project timelines are longer, the sense of urgency to work in is often absent resulting
to time lost in early project stages that can never be regained. However, as NorthBay follows
Agile methods, they recognize Parkinson's Law and the Student Syndrome apply to software
projects. Parkinson's Law says that: "Work expands to fill the time available" and Student
Syndrome: "Given a deadline, people tend to wait until the deadline is nearly here before
starting work." By having Sprints, work is time boxed into a manageable 2-week period and
there is always a sense of urgency.

This feature results in more efficiency and effectiveness in the development of the project and
management becomes easier than ever. Stuff gets done on time and planning and future
project allocation becomes clearer and visible.

4.1.5 Reduced Project Dependency over a few key employees

The departing of the key personnel from the project team with significant information, affects
the project development by a huge factor in the conventional approach. Since NorthBay
Works in Agile, its projects practice information sharing techniques such as common code
ownership, pair programming, and frequent reporting at daily stand ups, specifically to
decrease the "bus-factor" (the impact to the project of a key member being hit by a bus).
When this "bus factor" is reduced multiple team members share key information and the
hazard due to employee departure is as minimum as possible.

Also, often overlooked, is the fact that when working in an engaging, rewarding, empowered
and collaborative environment such as agile projects, people are far less likely to want to move
elsewhere so the risk is often avoided as well as reduced.

4.1.6 Stays up-to-date with the new Technological and Industrial Changes

NorthBay has always managed to stay within the competition by keeping its resources up to
date with the latest technological changes. As described by Mr. Ansar, few years back,
Northbay worked in collaboration with GameStudio building some online games that could be
sold to general market. The sales were good and the company generated some good profits,
even though the nature of the product was of Market-driven. However, as the use of this
strategy started to become obsolete and AWS started to offer better projects, despite of being
bespoke, the company shifted themselves to AWS.
 Moreover, shifting to AWS also encourages and endorses the company to learn new
technologies over the time as AWS continuously launches new APIs and brings on projects
that require latest programming languages to work. As Mr. Ansar said, “They company always
upgrades its resources whenever they get time”.

4.2 WEAKNESSES
This section mentions and highlights the observed and identified weaknesses in the Requirement
Engineering process of NorthBay and analyzes in detail, why the chosen feature is a part of the
category under discussion.

4.2.1 Faces Heavy Customer Interaction

As stated above, NorthBay follows Sprint Planning to meet its customers’ requirements. A
Sprint is a period of 2 weeks after which something is to be delivered to the customer, which
means customer interaction is required. Moreover, it also allows the customers to make
changes which further provides them the leverage to interact with them. This thing might be
a plus point in achieving customer satisfaction. However, this will be a drawback if the
company has to deal with a lot of projects or resources are few.

Moreover, customer interaction might be time wasting as well, as sometimes only an

acknowledgement is required from the customers but due to interaction, customers might
propose some new changes or get indulged into discussions which are unnecessary and time
wasting.

4.2.2 Less Face to Face Interaction with the customer

One of the major flaws, which Mr. Ansar explicitly pointed about, is very less to sometimes
zero face to face interaction with the customers. Since the company works in partnership with
AWS and most of their clients are foreign based, the only way to interact with customers is
video conferencing. Despite the sales team members, who might actually go abroad to meet
the customers and get the statement of work, important personnel such as the Developer and
Quality Assurance Analyst, do not get a chance to physically meet the customer, so this is also
one of the weaknesses NorthBay possesses.

4.2.3 Larger re-work during Combination of Components

While working in Agile, NorthBay works in sprints where components are to be designed in
every sprint from the chosen requirements. As the company is working on a component every
time, they need to bring all the pieces into one structure in the end, because the company
might not necessarily be integrating the components while development because the sprints
might have been altered in order by the customer. In such scenarios, the company has to face
re-work stress when all the separate components are forced to interact. In worst-case
scenarios, major portions of code might need to be re-written when two or more developers
are not in sync, resulting in higher and higher re-work costs as the number of iterations
increases.
4.2.4 Difficulty in Co-ordination if the Team Expands

With Agile having a strong emphasis on customer interaction, self-organizing teams, verbal
communication over-written-documentation, prototyping and requirements flexibility, it
becomes extremely complicated to coordinate work as an agile team grows. This hinders the
company to expand itself within staying in the same office or team because this issue requires
creation of more and more smaller headquarters and every agile team is bound to be small.

4.2.5 Interaction Hindrance with Remote-located Teams

The model NorthBay follows, works for co-located teams, where customer feedback is
mandatory in the real time. All team members are required to work close to each other in
order to share every progress to every member. However, if the company has teams that
reside on remote locations, this integration might prove very difficult to establish. This
geographic bound, makes it really hard for any in-line business to manage all team members
under one roof in practical.

4.3 OPPORTUNITIES
This section tries to highlight some key opportunities, NorthBay Solutions might be able to avail in the
betterment of its Requirement Engineering process and itself as a whole, providing with description
of the reasons for placing the given point in the respective category. Working in Agile and related
methodologies, in a literal manner, comes with endless opportunities for organizations for many
different reasons, a few of with are discussed in detail below.

4.3.1 Never Ending Learning Process

As NorthBay is working in association with AWS and under Agile methodologies as well, such
a combination boosts up the learning opportunities to their fullest. In Agile, there is always a
flexibility that team can maintain and might have to encounter unique, new, different and
challenging situations. Dealing with such situations, which might have never arisen in any
other development lifecycle due to their rigidity, makes every individual team member learn
something new and brainstorming empowered, every time. This experience and such skills
furnish the capabilities of every member of the team and creates individuals, matchless in
expertise and perfection.

Moreover, since AWS launch new APIs, languages and technologies every year and their
customers also ask for projects that can only be developed in the latest market technologies,
NorthBay arranges learning workshops for its employees to stay updated with all these latest
tools and technology which teaches a lot.

4.3.2 International Competition

As NorthBay enjoys the perks of being associated with AWS to provide clients to them, being
a part of the AWS community also comes with huge international competition. Whenever
AWS receives a customer, it decides upon individual ratings, previously done projects, current
projects on AWS Live and other parameters that who is worthy to handover the client to.
 This factor not just builds up as a sense of motivation to every person in the organization, but
it also comes as an opportunity which encourages them to work harder, efficient and effective
to raise the bars, their organization has currently set, and become better and better, so that
there isn’t any project that they might fail to receive from AWS.

4.3.3 Individual Skills Enhancement

One of the very important points raised by Mr. Ansar, projected and depicted a clear
opportunity for NorthBay, when analyzed carefully. According to Mr. Ansar, not everyone in
NorthBay is a Scrum Master and every Project manager in NorthBay needs to know agile more.
This point clearly indicates that every person at NorthBay is not a master of what they do.
There are numerous opportunities for every person within the working team and the leaders
and the supervisors to learn and enhance their current skillset with more experience of the
undergoing processes and always keep on track with their goal of becoming the best within
their area of expertise.

4.3.4 An Iterative and Incremental Methodology under Agile

Using models like the waterfall, teams only have one chance to get each aspect of a project
right but working in Agile enables the organization to revisit any section any phase of
development, whether it is the design or the elicitation or any other phase, throughout the
lifecycle. When a team stops and re-evaluates the direction of a project in every sprint, there
is always a time to move in other direction. This helps the organization to always welcome
changes, unlike other models, and provides with this flexibility and opportunity to groom and
standardize their processes in every individual cycle.

4.3.5 Inspect and Adapt Approach

NorthBay is currently following Sprint Methodology of Agile development model to meet its
customer’s requirements. Unlike any other Software development model, working in Sprint
and Agile gives the team an opportunity to inspect the current situation after every sprint and
adapt to a newer approach if the previously chosen approach is not feasible for them to follow
anymore. This results in more efficient, quick and effective delivery of customer requirements
and provides the team with multiples approaches to follow and not just rigidly stick to one
approach, the entire developmental cycle.

4.4 THREATS
After the detailed discussion of the Strengths, Weaknesses and Opportunities that Northbay
possesses, we come to the last part of our analysis which are the threats that our chosen company
faces or can face in the future. This section tries to cover the major threats NorthBay is encountering
or might encounter with and provides with a brief justification and analysis of placing the respective
points in this category.
4.4.1 International Competition

Well, despite of being a one of the opportunities, competition whether regional or

international is always a threat to any organization. And this threat gets the fire when it is with
organizations from all over the world.

NorthBay is working with AWS and as explained in section 4.3.3, any company working in
association with amazon, receives projects on the basis of certain parameters which includes
number of previously completed projects etc. Since organizations from all over the world work
in association with AWS, the competition becomes tougher and tougher when companies with
more projects done, having better customer satisfaction, larger number of customers on AWS
Live and related superiorities are the ones we are in competition with.

4.4.2 Miscalculated Project Schedule or SRP

Referring to the important fact once again, which is that NorthBay works in agile, there is
another potential threat the organization might face, which is, as the heading says, a
miscalculated project schedule or SRP. There are multiple reasons for which this anomaly
might occur such as when the Agile team overestimates or underestimates their tasks or when
the sprint goals are not met. Moreover, because the company allows the customer to make
changes, some changes made by the customer might also result in the above problem.

Such a scenario might be a serious threat to organization’s overall credibility as for any
business organization, customer satisfaction is the core objective. Since the scheduling is not
consistent anymore and products might not get delivered on time, this core objective might
remain unfulfilled.

4.4.3 Budget Issues

Like the previously mentioned potential threat in section 4.4.2, where project schedule might
be miscalculated, a company like NorthBay which follows Agile, might also face budgeting
issues, which might be interconnected with the scheduling issue. As the SRP is developed in
the beginning and the entire plan execution is decided pre-hand, the budget can also be easily
estimated from that. However, if the plan is not accurately furnished, the budget, one of its
dependents, will also result in the generation of a miscalculated value.

This serious threat might result in the project running in an over budgeted or under budgeted
situation which obviously will indicate poor planning, scope creep or other related factors.
Once again, customer satisfaction to its fullest might not seem to get achieved.
5 REFERENCES

1. https://northbaysolutions.com/about-us/
2. https://sidraurooj.wordpress.com/2017/06/16/waterfall-vs-agile-models-swot-analysis/
3. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SWOT_analysis
4. https://www.academia.edu/6381656/SWOT_Analysis_of_Agile_Methodologies