A model without validation is just some pictures

Models and Model Validation

Models are a great way to organize complex, multi-dimensional information. They help us to make sense of our organization in a way which spreadsheets and Visio diagrams never can.

But there’s a price to pay for all this well-structured information. A model may take 100s or 1,000s of hours to create, and a many more to maintain.

So it make sense, just like for any other product which our organization spends money to create, we need to make sure what we’ve created has the appropriate quality. And it’s amazing how few organizations, having spent 10,000s or 100,000s of (Euro, dollars, pounds) on a model don’t the spend a few 1,000 more to make sure it’s right.

In this article, we talk about content and mechanical quality, and the ways we can check for both:

• Content quality can only be determined by the owner of the information
• Mechical quality is some this we, the modelers, can work out.

For example, only the owner of a requirement can say that ‘All wibble shall be blue’ is the correct requirement.

That’s content quality.

As modelers, can check the mechanical quality:

• Does the requirement have owner?
• A business priority value, which is consnstent with the business priority values we always use?
• Does it have a unique reference?
• We might also check:
  • Is it part of some project, or a generic requirement oned by the business as a whole?
  • Is the requirement linked to some kind of businee goal? If not, why it even a requirement?

All these things can be checked mechanically. It’s just a question of writing down what our measure of quality are, and getting a tool to do the boring checking.