Category Archives: Slightly off-topic

These articles are only somewhat related, or completely unrelated to other articles at Tyner Blain.

Symbolism and Communication

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.

Outside reading: correlation and causality

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.

Dilbert does product managers

topsyWidgetPreload({ “url”: “http%3A%2F%2Ftynerblain.com%2Fblog%2F2006%2F01%2F31%2Fdilbert-does-product-managers%2F”, “style”: “big”, “title”: “Dilbert does product managers” }); 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 [...]

Happy New Year!

topsyWidgetPreload({ “url”: “http%3A%2F%2Ftynerblain.com%2Fblog%2F2006%2F01%2F01%2Fhappy-new-year%2F”, “style”: “big”, “title”: “Happy New Year!” }); 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 [...]

Concept Maps – Great Tool for Eating the Elephant (Brainstorming Ideas for a New Product)

Concept mapping is a tool I use for the brainstorming process of defining a product’s specification. IHMC developed the concept mapping software that we show in this article

Collision Detection

topsyWidgetPreload({ “url”: “http%3A%2F%2Ftynerblain.com%2Fblog%2F2005%2F11%2F24%2Fcollision-detection%2F”, “style”: “big”, “title”: “Collision Detection” }); I was doing a code-read for a team member earlier this year, and stumbled upon an elegant algorithm. This is super-simple, I realize, but I believe it’s a great example of avoiding complexity. Einstein said it best – “as simple as possible, but no simpler”. Problem [...]