Clarity’s Journey
I have spent most of my career as developer, manager, and leader as a consultant in the IT software industry. During this time, I have noticed that most engagements fall into two categories:
Customer wants to launch the project well, not make mistakes others have made and meet their commitments to stakeholders so they hire consultants to bring in this expertise.
- or -
Project is not going well, deadlines are being missed, budget may be in the red and the team is struggling so they hire consultants to stop the downward spiral.
In either case, my personal experience has always been that projects will either succeed or fail based on the quality of the requirements. This is born out by industry reports as well where the Standish Group in their CHAOS report cite that a staggering 71% of projects are struggling or failed with the most cited reason being poorly developed requirements. It’s little wonder this is the case, as the industry practice for as long as I have been working is to interview business users and ask them what they need while not excusing them from their regular duties for the new project. We hire Business Analysts to articulate business needs and requirements to fill in the gaps but this remains a manual, slow process that unfortunately is prone to error and the time dedicated to this activity is never enough. I have worked with many excellent and professional BA’s in my career and as projects leaders, we seem always ask them to carry the weight of requirements development on their shoulders and expect that quality, consistency and complete requirements will flow from their genius and not recognize the need better tools and evolving tools for their work.
The idea for Clarity arose from asking a few simple questions
What if AI could shorten the time needed to create requirements?
Could AI be used to discover missing or incomplete requirements?
Could AI be used to show effort estimates based on requirements?
Well, the answer to all of those questions is “Yes!” Clarity is Cogsentia’s first multi-agentic AI tool that is designed to help BA’s make the impossible possible with AI agents that constantly cross check, analyze and facilitate the task of creating quality SAFe Agile inspired artifacts that lead to better outcomes by spotting issues before development begins.
Cogsentia’s AI Enablement is about completing what I call the “First Mile” of software development. In logistics we all know the “last mile” is always the most expensive but in software, so much of the future success is driven by the needs for quality requirements, design, and architecture. Get these right and your project has a great chance for success but get any them wrong and your project will certainly struggle and may fail. Cogsentia’s ever-evolving suite tools are applying agentic AI to these areas that are vital to customer success.
The version of Clarity that you see demonstrated on this website is the first iteration of this vision but like any first iteration, there is room for improvement. This blog is dedicated to using Clarity along with other tools from Figma and Claude code to create the next version of Clarity to demonstrate the combined power of these platforms. Along the way we’ll explore the art of the possible for Clarity and demonstrate the awesome power of agentic AI to transform this process. I hope you’ll join us! While the content of this blog requires registration to follow - don’t worry - this is only so I can notify my followers when we have documented in this blog the next milestone for Clarity’s Journey.
- Walt Carper, Founder