Archive of Process Improvement Articles

Incremental delivery planning is not an oxymoron.  You just plan the soon-to-happen tasks in detail, and keep the distant tasks more vague.  Does this make sense?
Rolling-Wave Planning
Johanna Rothman has posted an article that provides a good introduction to rolling-wave planning.  She explains that she manages incremental projects with biweekly deliveries, and manages the project schedule [...]

The IIBA (International Institute of Business Analysis) has just released version 1.6 of A Guide to the Business Analysis Body of Knowledge, or the BA BOK. This new release adds over 100 pages of content and is the first “essentially complete” version.

Gartner reported that companies spent $3.7 Billion USD on application development tools in 2004, with a 5% annual growth rate. The Standish Group has shown that 40% to 60% of project failures are due to requirements failures. At least 1/3 of the money spent on getting more efficient at coding is being wasted - it should be spent on writing the right software.

We know how to deal with functional requirements. We know they are important - we can walk the dependency chain from goals to use cases to functional requirements. But how do we get to the non-functional requirements? Leathej1 points out the elephant in the room - non-functional requirements don’t get enough attention when it comes to testing. Let’s look into it some more…

Functional Testing, also referred to as System Testing of software is the practice of testing the completed software to confirm that it meets the requirements defined for the software. A functional test is typically a test of user interactions, but can also involve communication with external systems. We contrast functional testing with unit testing. We also show how functional testing provides different benefits than unit testing.

Martin Fowler has identified the key process elements of making Continuous Integration work. You could even argue that they are the elements that define Continuous Integration (done correctly). We include his list and our thoughts below:

Continuous Integration is the software development and quality process where all team members merge their code and verifies it frequently - at least daily. This verification project includes both an automated build process and automated testing. The main benefits of continuous integration come from risk-reduction and cost-reduction.

How good are our estimates? We can use PERT to estimate the time it will take to implement each requirement. We can use timeboxes to schedule the requirements within each release. If we don’t know how good our estimates are, its an exercise in futility. Scheduling is about more than predicting the future, its about knowing how much faith to have in our predictions.

Should we adopt an agile process for our team? Methods and Tools has posted a two part article titled Adopting an Agile Method. In thier article, they explore five areas of consideration. We provide our thoughts on each area.
Five areas to consider (from the article)

Our organization’s culture
Our customers and how they [...]

Gartner has a research report available for $95, titled Agile Requirements Definition and Management Will Benefit Application Development (report #G00126310 Apr 2005). The report is 7 pages long and makes an interesting read. Gartner makes a set of predictions for 2009 about requirements definition and management (RDM) systems, and the software created with RDM tools. Gartner misattributes several benefits of good process to RDM tools. We give them a 3.5/7 for their analysis - check out the details here.