Good information architecture article by Donna Maurer.

Donna characterizes information seeking as happening in one of four modes (from the perspective of the seeker)

1. Known-item
2. Exploratory
3. Don't know what you need to know
4. Re-finding 

Very detailed analysis of how usability can be a key component of agile methodologies. Explores the misconceptions and challenges of both schools with respect to the other. Details the agile development methodology. Contrasts the philosophies of both agile and UEX approaches. Discusses user-experience modeling in an agile framework with great examples and explanations.

Question: How does a large software project get to be one year late? Answer: One day at a time. In 1975 Professor Fred Brooks wrote a book called the Mythical Man Month which was full of good ideas and observations on how to successfully blow a project schedule and budget out. Are tey still relevent 30 years later?

An article on testing strategy for non-functional requirements that stimulated a fantastic discussion about functional vs. non-functional requirements. Great points are made both to eliminate and to highlight the distinctions. The strategy for developing a test plan is good, and worth reading alone, but this article is fun in that it went in a completely different direction with a very well informed debate.

The article is written in the context of implementing knowledge management strategies and it talks about a quality approach to project execution and requirements management.

This includes the importance of reconciling the details with the strategic direction when documentaing and managing corporate knowledge.

This is a useful article for anyone getting involved in the development of Knowledge Management systems or Business Process systems and Repositories.

…Is another man’s treasure. There are many different ways to document requirements when developing software. And there is a proliferation of requirements documents - MRD, PRD, SRS, FRS and design documents. Everyone has a perspective on what each document represents, and each person on the team has a unique perspective on what questions the document answers.

From Scott Ambler:

One of the great debates raging within the IT industry is whether or not agile software development techniques work.  My experience, and the experience of thousands of others, is that they do.  One of several reasons why agile techniques are so effective, in my opinion, is that they reduce the feedback cycle between the generation of an idea (perhaps a requirement or a design strategy) and the realization of that idea.  This not only minimizes the risk of misunderstanding, it also reduces the cost of addressing any mistakes.  In this article I explore this idea in detail. 

Okay, we're getting somewhere with our question. "Soul" seems to be the essence or the actuating cause that decides how someone or something behaves.

Does Your Product Have a Soul?
This brings us to the single most important question in this article:

CMMI (Capability Maturity Model Integration) is a description of the level of enlightenment of a process. It is essentially a measure of the quality and capability of a process. There are five categories, into one of which every process will fall. IBM took a similar approach to defining the requirements management process. In this series of posts, we will marry the two frameworks.

In this article, we will look at the definition of RMM level 1. We also cover the tradeoffs and benefits of the practices it requires. Finally, we look at the mapping from RMM level 1 to various CMMI levels.