topsyWidgetPreload({ “url”: “http%3A%2F%2Ftynerblain.com%2Fblog%2F2006%2F06%2F02%2Fwriting-design-free-requirements%2F”, “style”: “big”, “title”: “Writing Design-Free Requirements” }); One of the ten big rules of writing a good MRD is writing requirements that do not specify design. How do we specify enough detail to be actionable without constraining the engineering team? How do we trust our developers to do the right thing? The [...]
Category Archives: Design


Interaction Design Process Overview
Interaction design, as described by Alan Cooper in The Inmates are Running the Asylum, is a process for designing software by focusing on the most important users. Unlike traditional requirements gathering and solution design processes, interaction design focuses on the goals of a specific class of users, represented as a persona. Those goals are considered when defining scenarios that represent how the primary persona will use the software. The combination of goals and scenarios leads to design artifacts and a functional specification. We will explore these steps in more detail in this post.

Software Testing Series: Organizing a Test Suite with Tags Part Three
This is the third in a three-part post about using tags as a means to organize an automated unit test suite.
Part 3 of this post can be read as a standalone article. If it were, it would be titled Design elements of an automated unit test framework using tags. If you’re only reading this post and not parts 1 and 2, pretend that this is the title.

Describing the Software Development Process
Software development involves determining what to develop, documenting this decision, determining how to develop it, and actually developing it.We present a framework for describing this process in terms of layers of activity. Many people use pyramid analogies, which show the magnitude of effort in each layer (lines of code versus lines of requirements, for example). Many other people use inverted pyramids to reflect the importance (or impact) of work done at different layers (a sentance defining a strategy has more impact than a line of code). Some people show PERT diagrams of waterfalls or pretty circular arrows charts showing iterative lifecycles, or any of many good analogies.



