Archive of Software development Articles

This series is a reprint of an article by Scott Sehlhorst, written for developer.* in March 2006. A recent article on dailytech about “new” methods for software testing points to some very interesting research by the NIST (the National Institute of Standards and Technology) Information Technology Lab. We’ve split the original article into three articles to be more consistent in length with other Tyner Blain articles.

This is part 1 of a 3 part series.

We use actor hierarchies to organize the different users of a system. Different people play different roles, and thus do different jobs. We use different actors to identify and organize those people. When deploying a system globally, we usually discover people that do the same jobs, but do them differently. Incorporating the notion of personas lets us deal with this.

Bill Miller, who writes You Want it When?, a blog focused on improving the way you manage software development and I had a debate over email about outsourcing. We looked at pro’s and con’s, and our discussion centered around the best outsourcing model, and what the ramifications of outsourcing really are. Read on to see the back-and-forth.

A couple weeks ago we wrote about Outside-in Software Development, by Carl Kessler and John Sweitzer. One of their ideas about stakeholders and goals has got us thinking about traceability.

A heuristic evaluation (or heuristic analysis) is a quick, low-cost usability analysis of the design of a user interface. Pareto’s rule tells us that we can get 80% of the results from 20% of the effort. And that’s where discount usability tests like a heuristic evaluation come in to play. Formal, and more detailed usability studies yield better results - but cost more and take more time. A small investment can pay off big with a heuristic evaluation.

What is the right level of detail for writing requirements? What about for writing specifications (functional, non-functional requirements, etc)? The answer is that there is no one answer. But there are guidelines, and reasons to write more detail, or less detail - for any given product or project, and any given team. The reason we write requirements is so that they can be read. Understanding the readers is the key to determining which details to include in the requirements.

Product managers are often described as the hub or center of a software development organization. Saeed Khan takes umbrage with this under-appreciative image in an awesome article about information flow, product managers, and the SDLC.

What can you learn about your agile project from this Gannt chart? The one above looks out two years. It shows task dependencies and concurrencies. If you’re iteratively developing software, do you really expect to know what you’ll be doing two years from now, to know if you truly have a dependency? You may understand the dependencies with a two-month time horizon. But how much effort are you investing in creating a detailed, two-month Gannt chart? And how much value are you getting from it?

Why don’t more companies and teams use agile development techniques? We know some teams just aren’t aware of them - although that list is getting shorter every year. The benefits of iterative development over waterfall development are pretty well established. I don’t believe I’ve seen a study that shows that waterfall is more effective. Do people refuse to believe in the data? Or maybe they are unable to believe.

Your project is almost finished. Last week, it was almost finished. And you suspect that next week, it will still be almost finished. Why does this happen, and what can you do about it? In some ways, we’ve known about this problem for almost 2500 years But the solutions are still far from widespread.