Monthly Archives: August 2006

BPMN Diagrams – Undefined Intermediate Events

By Scott Sehlhorst | August 18th, 2006

There are 9 different intermediate events in BPMN. One of them, called the none intermediate event, is “undefined” in that it doesn’t specify a distinct behavior. Unlike the other intermediate events, the none intermediate event has a single interpretation, and will only be used with a specific methodology.

Posted in Business Process Modeling, Requirements, Requirements gathering | Tagged bpmn, bpmn changing state, bpmn diagram example, bpmn diagrams, bpmn example, bpmn intermediate event, bpmn intermediate event example, bpmn none intermediate event, bpmn none intermediate event example, bpmn symbols, bpmn tutorial, business process modeling diagrams, managing data | Leave a comment

John Henry, Manual Tester

By Scott Sehlhorst | August 17th, 2006

There’s a piece of North American folklore about John Henry, who was a manual laborer during the expansion of the railroads in our country. His job was being replaced by steam-driven heavy equipment, as the railroad industry applied technology to become more efficient. The same dynamics are happening today with manual testers. We need to make sure that manual testers avoid John Henry’s fate – read on to see why.

Posted in Software development, Test Automation, Testing | Tagged automated testing, black box testing, blackbox testing, functional testing, gray box testing, graybox testing, grey box testing, greybox testing, managing data, manual testing, white box testing, whitebox testing | 4 Comments

Version Numbering Makes Release Planning Harder

By Scott Sehlhorst | August 16th, 2006

David, at 37signals, writes an interesting post about changing the way their company is managing the naming of new versions of their Backpack information manager product.

David starts with the premise that there is too much feature-creep when scheduling deliveries of software updates.

Posted in Slightly off-topic | Tagged 37signals, communicating release content, managing data, planning software, release planning, software releases, version numbering | 5 Comments

BPMN Diagrams – Introduction to Intermediate Events

By Scott Sehlhorst | August 15th, 2006

Intermediate events are one of the more complex and expressive elements of BPMN diagrams. Here we introduce the different intermediate events.

Posted in Business Process Modeling, Requirements, Requirements gathering | Tagged bpmn, bpmn events, bpmn intermediate events, bpmn symbols, bpmn tutorial, business process modeling diagrams, managing data | 5 Comments

BPMN Diagrams – How To Use End Events (Part 2)

By Scott Sehlhorst | August 14th, 2006

This is part two of a two part article. The first part is “How To Use End Events (Part 1)”. End events describe how a process ends. Often, the end of one process can initiate other behaviors within a business process. Like death and taxes, every business process has an end. Sometimes more than one.

Posted in Business Process Modeling, Requirements, Requirements gathering | Tagged bpmn, bpmn compensation end event, bpmn diagrams, bpmn example, bpmn examples, bpmn link end event, bpmn multiple end event, bpmn symbols, bpmn terminate end event, bpmn tutorial, business process modeling diagram, business process modeling diagrams, business process modeling example, business process modeling examples, managing data | Leave a comment

BPMN Diagrams – How To Use End Events (Part 1)

By Scott Sehlhorst | August 11th, 2006

End events describe how a process ends. Often, the end of one process can initiate other behaviors within a business process. Like death and taxes, every business process has an end. Sometimes more than one.

Posted in Business Process Modeling, Requirements, Requirements gathering | Tagged bpmn, bpmn cancel end event, bpmn diagrams, bpmn end event, bpmn error end event, bpmn example, bpmn examples, bpmn message end event, bpmn symbols, bpmn tutorial, business process modeling diagram, business process modeling diagrams, business process modeling example, business process modeling examples, managing data | Leave a comment

Free Webinar on Strategic Product Management

By Scott Sehlhorst | August 10th, 2006

Sit back and enjoy a cup of coffee while listening to a great, 30 minute, presentation by Barbara Nelson, Pragmatic Marketing instructor. Citrix is hosting a free webinar for (well, for everyone, I guess), in exchange for contact information. Barbara presents a great overview of the strategic role of product management, and Pragmatic’s framework. For people who’ve previously attended the PPM training, this is a good refresher – for other folks – if you want to know why product managers should be doing strategic work, check this out.

Posted in Product Management | Tagged barbara nelson, barbara nelson pragmatic, managing data, practical product management, pragmatic marketing, pragmatic marketing webinar, pragmatic product management, product management webinar, strategic product management | Leave a comment

Inside Out is Backwards – Feature Focused or Goal Driven

By Scott Sehlhorst | August 9th, 2006

Kathy Sierra has another great post on the problems people face when using products. One of the sources of the problems is when engineers think “from the inside out” and focus on features or capabilities. People have goals, and they want to achieve goals, not use capabilities.

Posted in Product Management, Requirements | Tagged feature focus, goal driven, goal driven design, goal driven requirements, goal-driven development, managing data | 4 Comments

BPMN Diagrams – Digging Artifacts

By Scott Sehlhorst | August 9th, 2006

Artifacts are more than business detritus. Documents are created in business processes that represent actionable information. See how to represent these useful artifacts in business process modeling notation.

Posted in Business Process Modeling, Requirements, Requirements gathering | Tagged bpmn artifact, bpmn artifacts, bpmn diagramming, bpmn diagramming artifacts, bpmn diagrams, bpmn symbols, bpmn tutorial, business process modeling artifacts, business process modeling diagram, managing data, pbmn diagram artifact | 2 Comments

Quality and Requirements – You Got Chocolate In My Peanut Butter

By Scott Sehlhorst | August 7th, 2006

Quality writers are writing about requirements. Requirements writers are writing about quality. Just like the Reese’s Peanut Butter Cup – Two Great Tastes that Taste Great Together. You can’t have one without the other.

Posted in Requirements, Requirements gathering, Software development, Testing | Tagged managing data, quality and requirements, quality requirements, requirements and quality, requirements elicitation, requirements errors, requirements quality, writing good requirements, writing quality requirements | Leave a comment