We’ve presented an example of the software development process across several posts over the last two weeks. In this post we tie them all together, showing the steps in process order.

The Lost Garden has an outstanding post by Danc - Software Development’s Evolution towards Product Design.

Danc writes about how the software development process has evolved over the years. He characterizes this evolution in four distinct phases.

This is the third in a three-part post about using tags as a means to organize an automated unit test suite.

Part 3 of this post can be read as a standalone article. If it were, it would be titled Design elements of an automated unit test framework using tags. If you’re only reading this post and not parts 1 and 2, pretend that this is the title.

Prioritizing software requirements

Jason at 37 signals recently posted about essential vs non-essential requirements - the software equivalent of Am I hot or not? He talks about the prioritization decisions their team went through as part of bringing Campfire to it’s launch. Campfire is an online collaboration application that just launched today. We will talk about how their prioritization

Guy Kawasaki wrote a great article last month about how to give a great presentation. You should be reading his stuff!

He goes into details about each of his ten eleven tips from his perspective. Here’s a quick summary of those tips with our thoughts.

Requirements management software will not solve our requirements problems.
Jerry Aubin of Seilevel made this great point in his presentation this evening at the IEEE Computer Society, Austin / A-SPIN event. This was a great event, focusing on how to take requirements management “to the next level” - not just being good at it, but [...]

This video showing the abuse of jargon (2 minutes) is absolutely hysterical, and should be watched for humor alone. However, it also drives the point home about the effects of using jargon when writing requirements.
When we write a PRD or SRS if we use the jargon of one domain, this is what we will [...]

Writing requirements without ambiguity

This is one of the harder parts of writing good requirements. Marcus tells us to avoid it with a good example here. Jerry Aubin at Seilevel has written an outstanding post on the subject, The art and science of disambiguation. Jerry starts his post with a gripping example from Weinberg and Gause:

Our previous post, Requirements vs design - which is which and why, describes our position on which parts of the software development process are requirements-activities, and which parts are design activities. The debate among professionals about these distinctions is ongoing, and continues in the comments on that post. The length of the debate, combined with the skills of those debating demonstrates that it isn’t a black and white issue.

In this post, we will try and explore the reasons why this debate is ongoing. We will do that by exploring the symbolism of the terms involved, as well as the roles of different members of the software development team.

Symbolism and communication
One of the challenges in successful communication comes from the way people use symbols as part of the organization of their thoughts. Symbolic thinking and reasoning is an incredibly efficient process. It allows us to create representational views of the world that allow us to process much more information than our brains have evolved to handle.

What does this have to do with requirements?

We see from our earlier post on requirements gathering techniques that communication is central to the most important requirements elicitation methods. Understanding how people associate ideas symbolically helps us communicate more effectively.