What is the better requirements management model for capturing business rules? The use case, or the UML statechart? In this article, we explore how customer orders are submitted and processed, and contrast how use cases and statecharts expose and document business requirements and business rules.
Outside Reading: Mary and Tom Poppendieck on Lean Software Development
InfoQ has an outstanding interview with Mary and Tom Poppendieck about Lean Software Development. One of the longer interviews on the topic, and full of great content. You can watch streaming video of the interview, jump around to the answers of specific questions, or read the full transcript – great format for presenting a long form interview like this.
Use Case vs. Process Flow – Failure Handling
Should you use use cases or process flow diagrams to document business requirements? At some level, they both document the same thing, they just document it differently. The best requirements will come from doing both – but what if you are forced to choose one? What are the tradeoffs between use cases and process flows? In this article we look at the documentation of failure handling.
Flashback: A Year Ago This Week on Tyner Blain [2006-03-17]
A look back at the best from a year ago.
Explaining Agile Development…
…to your Brother-in-Law. A great article by Joe Little, on his new blog. Thanks Mishkin for telling us about it. Joe’s article serves as an excellent precursor to our comparison of agile software development methodologies. It would also be extremely effective advice for getting mindshare prior to rolling out agile […]
Ten Supercharged Active Listening Skills To Make You More Successful
Active listening is about more than gaining understanding. Active listening is about giving. Giving assurance that you understand someone’s needs. Giving confidence that you will address those needs. Giving feedback and acknowledgement that someone’s input is valuable. If you haven’t tried active listening, you may think it is a passive, receptive activity. Active listening skills will help you guide your customers and your team to do the right thing, and enjoy the experience.
Writing Use Cases For Estimation
You write use cases to define the scope of your project. Use cases describe what people are using your product to accomplish. Use cases provide a framework for defining the details of the product. You can estimate your project effort with use cases. But you have to write the use cases at the right level of detail.
How To Visualize Stakeholder Analysis
The first step of gathering requirements is to identify who can give you the requirements. Business processes include communication between different people inside the organization. Communication also includes people outside the organization. When gathering requirements, it can be easy to overlook the people who don’t use the software directly. Those people may still be stakeholders. Read on to see how to approach stakeholder analysis.
Software Usability and Learning Curves
Learning curves have been studied for decades when evaluating manufacturing systems and proposing cost reductions. The Boston Consulting Group did an oft-cited analysis in the 1960’s that describes how people get faster at tasks through repetition. Peter Abilla looked at the extension of this to writing software. We look at how it applies to using software.