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.
“For what one idea do you want your product to stand in the mind of your customer?” I heard Roger Cauvin ask that question at the most recent ProductCamp Austin [correction - he said it here - thanks Roger], and the quote has been jumping to the front of my mind almost daily ever since. Maybe by writing about it I can exorcise the demon and get back to using the idea instead of being haunted by it.
Engagement – that’s what this whole product management blogging thing is about. Check out what Tyner Blain readers found to be the most engaging articles in 2009.
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” even though it is not your job to design the solution.
Your company is building out a toolkit to support third-party developers. You’ll need a bunch of different types of widgets – combo-boxes, text entry fields, domain-specific controls, etc. You’ve got a long list of desired controls from your customers. You’re agile. What do you build first?
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:
The maturity model approach to describing organizations and processes comes and goes out of fashion. It is a repeating framework de jour. In the game of agile jargon whack-a-mole, the agile maturity model is poking its head up again.
Read the rest of the article…
Jump forward in time to the day of your next big product launch (first release, new features, new market segment, etc). And your site/application crashes due to the “unexpected” demand. All you can do now is look for a bucket of water to put out the fire. What could you have done to prevent this disaster? Jump back to today and start doing it!
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 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.
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These articles are written primarily for business analysts and product managers. Hopefully they help with thinking, doing, and training. Welcome aboard and let us know what you think!
