On March 30th CIO magazine published an article titled Do’s and Don’ts of Outsourcing Benchmarks. The article spurred us to write about outsourcing models for product development – it is otherwise unrelated, but interesting. [2015 Edit: The CIO article has been removed, check out these lessons from successes and failures […]
Passing the Wrong Whitebox Tests
We’ve talked about the value of using whitebox testing in our Software testing series post on whitebox testing. What we haven’t explored is how to make sure we are creating the right tests. We have to validate our tests against the requirements. This post shows where the flaw is in the typical whitebox testing process, and how to fix it.
A reader emailed us with the comment, “It’s been my experience that developers can’t test their own code.” Their problem was that they were missing a link in the software development chain (missing a step in the process).
Product management success in the conceptual age
The information age is ending and the conceptual age is beginning. In A Whole New Mind, Daniel Pink proposes that six characteristics of right-brain thinking are key to success in the new economy. Nils Davis realizes that these characteristics are embodied by good product managers today. We will define the conceptual age, review the six characteristics, and see how this applies to product management.
Magic square of innovation
Marcus Ting-A-Kee has a post on his blog with a great magic square diagram describing a perspective on innovation. This framework provides us with an easy way to assess the potential impact of an innovation. We will…
* show how to use the square
* look at some example innovations
* and use the square to prioritize requirements
Foundation Series: Feature Driven Development (FDD) Explained
Feature driven development (FDD) is one of several agile methodologies for developing software iteratively. Iterative development is the opposite of waterfall development. FDD is a process that begins with high level planning to define the scope of the project, which then moves into incremental delivery. Each increment of delivery involves a design phase and an implementation phase. The scope of each increment is a single feature. Extreme programming (XP) is a much better known agile methodology. XP is often described as an emergent design process, in that no one knows what the finished product is going to be until the product is finished. FDD, by comparison, defines the overall scope of the project at the beginning, but does not define the details.
Expert systems – do what I say, not what I should have said
We’ve studiously avoided talking about requirements for expert systems because it is such a small niche of software development. Please let us know in the comments on this post if this is an area you would like to read more about. This post is both a discussion of the main barrier to success for these systems and an introduction to future posts if you ask for them in the comments on this post. Expert systems, or AI programs can solve some of the hardest problems. Yet AI software has not dominated the software landscape, neither Heinlein’s nor Vinge’s fictions have become real. Why has AI software failed? It isn’t that the hardest problems are too hard to solve, it’s that they often don’t need to be solved at all.
Definition of sunk cost
Sunk cost is an expression representing the unrecoverable amount of money that has already been placed into an ongoing investment or project. It is one of the simplest, yet most commonly misused financial measurements of a project. We’ll learn how to avoid the most common mistake in project (financial) management, and how to survive when our boss makes the mistake.
Interaction Design and Structured Requirements
subtitle: Wiegers and Cooper assimilated
Wiegers promotes structured requirements. Cooper touts Interaction Design. Both have great ideas. Both “wave their hands” at parts of the process. In this post, we’ll talk about how to combine the two philosophies to get the best of both worlds.
How To Create Personas for Goal Driven Development
We mentioned the creation of personas in our overview of the interaction design process. In this post we will talk in more detail about how to create them. We will cover identification and prioritization of the personas, defining the corporate and personal goals for the personas, and creating the anecdotal stories that give each persona an identity against which we can make design decisions. Scenarios are also defined for the primary personas, which drive the creation of the functional requirements specification.