Archive of Consulting Articles

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.

Some outside reading…

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.

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.

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.

Sometimes we forget that people use our software. Neil Mix reminds us that we should treat our users like people. For anyone who’s worked retail or food service jobs (like yours truly), we shoud treat our customers like customers.

Marcus Ting-A-Kee has assembled a great presentation on the value to his company of requirements management tools. In addition to creating the presentation and sharing it with all of us, he shares the process of creating the presentation in several articles.