A little Halloween fun - an homage to Edgar Allen Poe describing this week’s issue triage and prioritization meeting.

We ran a series called Writing Good Requirements - The Big Ten Rules in May 2006. Bloggers are notorious for not being able to count. We had ten rules at the time, and now we’re adding an eleventh. Writing Correct Requirements may have been the unwritten rule, but now we take a look at it.

Imagine if potential customers gathered together, each donating some funds, to specify the development of software. Those funds would be paid to whomever agreed to meet their demands. Essentially a free market system, balancing out supply and demand. Well, this has happened recently. Read on to take a first look at this and join in the discussion.

Does your product have soul? Michael Shrivathsan asks this question, and we take it in a slightly different direction.

The Monty Python troupe helps us remember five (no, three sir!) things about software requirements. And now for something completely different…

“Why?” The question is our inspiration and our muse. “Why?” is the justification for our requirements. The key to identifying “What?” and “When?”, which lead to “How?” and “How Much?” But there is another use for “Why?” - communication of intent (with stakeholders and implementers). Requirements documents are artifacts, but they are also dynamic documents. By documenting “Why?” a requirement is a requirement, we make it easier for future readers to understand.

The polls are open! Go to their announcement to take the annual Product Management and Marketing Survey! Then check our our post for links to previous survey results and trends.

If you sell products or services that Tyner Blain readers would want, or have your own blog and want higher quality ads check this out. Tyner Blain has joined a new ad network that should help us provide better ads for our readers. We’re really excited about the network, as the features seem to very effectively address the goals of both advertisers and publishers (bloggers). Regular readers - feel free to skip this one, see you tomorrow at our regularly scheduled time.

Web Ink Now has a great article and analysis of the gobbledegook that passes for marketing messages. They’ve done an analysis of over 50,000 articles during the first nine months of 2006. Not only have they identified many of the most ridiculous terms, they’ve ranked them (or stack-ranked them, as a former employer would say) based on frequency.

Finding the right balance when defining requirements can be hard. On one side, we want to avoid an inadequate system - “Don’t prevent my success by excluding features I might want”. On the other side, we want to avoid cost-overruns, delayed schedules, and negative-ROI features. This can be a hard line to walk.