General Requirements and Principles

The requirements listed in this section are widely applicable to all phases of the Hephaestus Process.

External Requirements

These are requirements that must be addressed in some way outside of the definition of the Hephaestus Process itself, though they need to be considered in the design of the process to ensure they will be feasible.

• Management Support
  • Management must support the process fully. This ensures the process is always followed and never circumvented.
  • The process needs to address accountability. Where the process calls for it, it is up to management to ensure appropriate measures are applied.

General Requirements

These requirements are principles driving the definition of all requirements.

• Scalability - The process and requirements it imposes must be scalable on all levels.
  • Individual pieces of the process must scale reasonably and adequately for any sized project.
  • The process as a whole must also scale, merging or eliminating steps for smaller projects, including additional needed structure for large ones.
  • Various aspects of process and requirements may have different needs of scale for any given project, and so the various axes should be allowed to scale independently.

• Factors to scale the process to include:
  • project size
    • number of people involved
    • time people are involved
  • product size
  • expected product lifetime

• Emergencies

  Emergency situations may call for real-time responses. The process should include mechanisms which do not harm response time, but at the same time as much as possible do not sacrifice necessary aspects of process which ensure quality and maintainability.

• Clarity

  All groups, procedures and documents called for by the Hephaestus process must be defined clearly and unambiguously. As appropriate, this means that the process documentation must provide good templates and examples defining what is called for. These documents must be careful to explain things that are permitted, required, or optional on various scales or in various exceptional conditions.

• Accessibility

  All documents will be available on-line, accessible by all supported platforms, and should be easy to find.

• Training

  Deliverables of Hephaestus should include appropriate training.

• Standard Tools, Processes and Standards

  Wherever practical, standard tools and processes should be defined and provided to be used in the process to help supply:

  • Interoperability
  • Efficient Resource Usage - for things done perhaps only once, but over and over counted across projects
  • Reproducibility - avoiding hand procedures that can be automated
  • Maintainability - using portability standards and tools as appropriate
  • Sanity Checking - ensuring the right things are done in the right ways, and appropriate input is gathered
• Accountability

  As appropriate, people need to be held accountable for their roles in the process.

• Project Tracking

  It should be easy for outsiders to determine what the deliverables are, when they are due, and whether or not they're on track.

• External Processes and Procedures

  Wherever Hephaestus interfaces to any of these, the assumptions and requirements about them need to be stated (especially when the called for processes/procedures are currently nonexistent).

• Validation

  The process must ensure that the product is built according to the customer's specification. For example, there must be customer acceptance of the project requirements. If a prototype is part of the design, customer acceptance is also required at that stage.

• Modifiable

  Hephaestus should facilitate modifying the output of any phase as needed, after the phase has ended. Such changes should propagate to the outputs of all affected phases.