Agile values working software over comprehensive documentation – it is 1/4th of the original manifesto. That doesn’t mean don’t document! It means don’t document more than you need to document. Documentation does have value, but the practice of documenting got excessive – that’s why a reaction to the bad stuff earned a spot as one of the pillars of agile. How do you avoid over-reacting when changing a culture of over-documentation?
Category Archives: Requirements

Provocateurs Gather the Best Requirements
Ask someone what they want, and they’ll tell you they want a faster horse. Provoke them, and they’ll tell you they have a ‘get there faster’ problem, an ‘equine waste disposal’ problem, and issues with total cost of ownership.
Read the rest of the article …

A Prototype is Worth a Thousand Lines of Code
A picture is worth a thousand words. A prototype is worth a thousand lines of code. Two key elements of product management – and of agile development are elicitation and feedback. Low fidelity artifacts can significantly improve both. Polished, codified prototypes can create problems that prevent you from getting the benefits of communication.

Use Cases for Iterative Development
Almost everything I’ve read about use cases focuses on describing what needs to be added to your product. Agile development says “get it working first, make it better second.” That means changing the way the software enables a user to do something they can already do. How do you manage requirements for incremental improvement?
Read the rest of the article …

Passionate Requirements
Writing passionate requirements is not about writing with passion. It is about writing the requirements that cause people to be passionate about your product. Find the most important problem, for your most important customers. Understand the essence of what is important to solve that problem, for only those people. Then write passionate requirements.

Customer-Centric Market Model
A market can be thought of as the collection of contexts in which you might sell your product. You can split your market into a set of market segments. Each of those segments represents a group of customers, each of whom shares a set of problems for which they would pay for solutions.

Verifiable Requirements
Writing Verifiable Requirements should be a rule that does not need to be written. Everyone reading this has seen or created requirements that can not be verified. The primary reason for writing requirements is to communicate to the team what they need to accomplish. If you can’t verify that what the team delivered is acceptable, neither can the team. This may be the most obvious of the rules of writing requirements – but it is ignored every day.





