Measuring Great Design – Mad Libs Input Form

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I came across a really interesting article LukeW.com, showing how making changes to the way an input form on a website increased interaction by 25 to 40%. The changes reflect the value of thinking outside-in, investing in user experience, and performance measurement. Bonus: the idea is cool.

Design-Free Requirements

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Design-Free requirements are important for two reasons, and hard for two other reasons. Design-free requirements are hard because you “know what you want” when you should be documenting “why you want it.” Writing design-free requirements can be hard when you don’t trust your development team to “do the right thing” […]

Concise Requirements

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Concise requirements give your team a useful, easy to read and easy to change understanding of what must be done. Great requirements exist to do three things: Identify the problems that need to be solved. Explain why those problems are worth solving. Define when those problems are solved.

Writing Complete User Stories

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User stories can make requirements management a lot easier. They shift some of the communication from up-front documentation to ongoing dialog. That’s the main reason they work so well for agile teams. And agile teams focus on “what’s next?” instead of an ever-changing “what’s everything?” The problem is, when those […]

Agile Non-Functional Requirements

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Just because your requirement is not a user story does not mean you have to throw it out when planning your next sprint. See one way (that is working) for managing non-functional requirements with an agile team.

User Stories and Use Cases

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User Stories are one of the key agile artifacts for helping implementation teams deliver the most important capabilities first. They differ from use cases in some important ways, but share more commonalities than you might think.