Archive of Communication Articles

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.

Effective communication of requirements requires more than documentation and broadcasting. Effective communication requires interaction and collaboration. Alistair Cockburn addresses this in his analysis of project successes and modes of communication.

We create project dashboards all the time to show status, or to give upper management an update. Dashboards and scorecards are great for giving us a “quick view” into the health of a project - they give us a way to drill down. Many of us use the colors red / yellow / green, with a stoplight metaphor. The problem is that some of us are colorblind. Johanna Rothman gives us a GREAT tip.

You knew it would happen eventually, the big ten rules of writing requirements has become the big twelve rules. Maybe scope creep isn’t such a bad thing after all. Writing style plays an important role in writing requirements too.

Johanna Rothman recently wrote an article with a poignant introduction: “A project team focuses on an interim milestone, works like the devil to meet that milestone. They meet the milestone, look up, and realize they’re not at the end of the project–they still have to finish the darn thing. They’re living the Crossing the Desert syndrome.” Fixing it isn’t enough - how do we prevent it from happening?

We talk about characteristics of good requirements, including completeness, correctness, and ambiguity. But how do we assure that our requirements are complete, correct, and unambiguous? Simple, Captain, with logic.

Pair programming is a bit of a foreign concept for many people in business. A few years ago, it was foreign to most programmers too. Pair programming is a powerful technique for software development because it allows two people to look at the same problem/solution from two different perspectives at the same time. Would that same approach work for business analysis?

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.

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.