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.
Business Rules And Requirements
What is the difference between a business rule and a business requirement? Does the difference matter? A business requirement is something that is multi-customer, and a business rule represents a single customer’s approach to meeting that requirement. Product managers and analysts care about both, but product managers emphasize requirements, and analysts focus more on rules.
How Many People for Requirements Elicitation?
How many people should be involved in requirements elicitation? A question from one of our readers via email. Hi Scott, in the last months I faced the issue of managing the requirement elicitation phase in an Identity Management project. I have a very simple question. In your opinion how many […]
Nice To Have
Gathering requirements isn’t like asking kids what they want for their birthday. We aren’t giving our customers carte blanche, we are trying to identify the valuable requirements – things that solve problems and achieve value in a significant way. Needs and Wants Our customers usually know what they want. There’s […]
Wants and Needs
When a client asks for a capability or feature – is it a want or a need? How do we prioritize them?
Goal Driven Upgrades
Kathy Sierra writes (another) great article at Creating Passionate Users. This time, she talks about why users don’t upgrade and presents ways to get users to install the latest version. We focus in this article on one way in particular – using goal-driven documentation to encourage upgrading.
Use Case Driven Documentation
Yesterday we wrote about focusing our documentation on what our users are trying to accomplish. With a structured requirements approach, or with an interaction-design driven approach, we’ve already solved half the problem – determining what to document.
Goal-Driven Documentation
Why do we write documentation? Because someone told us to write it? Because our competitors have it? Or because we want our software to be easier to use? It should be the third one, but often, writing documentation is an afterthought, and it is deprioritized, and we just get it done, instead of thinking about the goals for doing it in the first place and doing it right.