Archive of Foundation series Articles
August 24th, 2010

People who already use Scrum will only find one new thing in this article – a way to communicate what happens inside a sprint that has proven effective for me. People who are new to Scrum who wonder “how do things work inside a sprint?” will see how things work in a way that avoids hyperbole and is easy to map to what they already understand from traditional software development processes.

Posted in Agile, Foundation series, Requirements, Requirements Models, Software development, Testing, User Stories | 20 Comments »
October 28th, 2009

You have an eCommerce site. You sell products online. Do you cross-sell additional products? Do you upsell to better products? This article explains the difference between cross-sell and upsell, and looks at some real-world data about the effectiveness of both.

Posted in Business Analysis, Foundation series, eCommerce | 5 Comments »
June 1st, 2009

When prices go up, demand goes down. But how much does it go down? Price elasticity of demand is the term economists use for the math that describes this behavior.
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Posted in Business Analysis, Foundation series | 9 Comments »
August 13th, 2008

There are a bunch of new* ways of selling software these days. SaaS (Software as a Service) has been in the consumer space for a while, and is making significant inroads into the enterprise software space today. If you’re considering purchasing or using software, you should understand what SaaS means and how it is different from the software products of the past.*
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Posted in Business Analysis, Foundation series, Slightly off-topic | 30 Comments »
October 16th, 2007

One of the most common mistakes people make when looking at data is to jump to conclusions about the data. We all live in a world of cause and effect. It is only natural that when we see data that appears to show cause and effect, we assume that it does. But it often doesn’t. This article shows the difference between cause and effect relationships and correlated data.
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Posted in Foundation series | 5 Comments »
February 6th, 2007
Utility is an abstract concept usually relegated to economics. What is it? How does it work?
Posted in Foundation series | 1 Comment »
January 18th, 2007
Inbound product manager or outbound product manager – what’s the difference? We’ll look at the overall role, and the breakdown of responsibilities. We also follow-up with some suggested detailed reading.
Posted in Foundation series, Product Management | No Comments »
December 1st, 2006
JAD is an acronym that stands for Joint Application Design. JAD sessions are collaborative meetings where the customers meet with developers to determine what the product needs to be or do.
Posted in Foundation series, Requirements, Requirements gathering | 5 Comments »
July 13th, 2006
What is a data dictionary and how is it used when communicating and managing requirements?
Posted in Foundation series, Requirements, Requirements gathering, Software requirements specification | 2 Comments »
June 26th, 2006
Use cases represent the activities that people do when interacting with a system to achieve their goals. Use cases are a very effective tool for communicating and documenting what a system is intended to accomplish. Formal use cases are use cases that use a specific structure to represent the information. Knowing how to read a formal use case is important.
Posted in Communication, Foundation series, Requirements, Requirements Models, Use Cases | 4 Comments »