Archive of Slightly off-topic Articles

Scout got my Diet Mt. Dew today, so no late night blogging tonight. Apologies for the short notice - see y’all tomorrow!
Scott

Marcus Ting-A-Kee has a post on his blog with a great magic square diagram describing a perspective on innovation. This framework provides us with an easy way to assess the potential impact of an innovation. We will…

* show how to use the square
* look at some example innovations
* and use the square to prioritize requirements

Net present value, or NPV is the great equalizer of financial analysis.

NPV allows us to compare any two investments and determine which is the better investment.

NPV tells us how many dollars, today, we would be willing to spend to receive money in the future. NPV lets us compare investments that pay back money in very different ways - we can decide if we would rather have $10,000 in one year, or $500 per month for 20 months. Without NPV, the two investments appear to be the same (they both return $10,000), but one of them is better than the other.

The main point of Laura’s article is the importance of engaging users to find out what they really care about. In this post we are going to pick up on another point she makes indirectly.
Laura also points out indirectly that the inclination of companies is all too often to build software that looks good on paper instead of software that is good in practice. A sort of rat-race of me-too’s and copycatting. Companies that add features solely because the competition has them are in for trouble.

Another great Dilbert - http://www.dilbert.com/comics/dilbert/archive/dilbert-20060226.html
I won’t show the cartoon here, but here’s a quote from the first two panels:
Pointy-haired boss: Why is your project four months behind?
Dilbert: I still don’t have the user’s requirements because she’s a complete nut-job.
[...]
This cartoon does point out the critical importance of eliciting the requirements, not requesting the requirements. [...]

What do you hate about Tyner Blain’s blog?
ack/nak posted a great idea - ask customers what they hate about you.
Seth Godin has a book - Permission Marketing: Turning Strangers into Friends and Friends into Customers, and in his free ebook, Flipping the Funnel, he expands on what he originally wrote. He talks about [...]

Symbolism and communication
One of the challenges in successful communication comes from the way people use symbols as part of the organization of their thoughts. Symbolic thinking and reasoning is an incredibly efficient process. It allows us to create representational views of the world that allow us to process much more information than our brains have evolved to handle.

What does this have to do with requirements?

We see from our earlier post on requirements gathering techniques that communication is central to the most important requirements elicitation methods. Understanding how people associate ideas symbolically helps us communicate more effectively.

A while ago, we asked you to send us links to good blogs. Jeff Kinsey sent us a link to his blog, Ski’s throughput on command. We found this post on logical thinking processes which is good. Thanks Ski for sending us the link!

Their post discusses the differences between causality and correlation of events.

http://www.dilbert.com/comics/dilbert/archive/dilbert-20060129.html
We won’t copy the image of the cartoon - but we’ll tell you that it opens with Alice: “I’ll need to know your requirements before I start to design the software.”
ObRelatedTopic: How to interview when gathering requirements
Great Dilbert products
The latest book (Nov 2005) from Scott Adams, Thriving on Vague Objectives
From D. Reller:
Another Dilbert collection, another [...]

Thank you to everyone who has been reading the blog here at Tyner Blain!
And I’d like to send a double thanks to everyone who’s commented on a post, linked to the blog, or told a friend about it. It makes a difference and I appreciate it.