Foundation Series: Structured Requirements (2006/01/04)
Karl Wiegers wrote the book on structured requirements – Software Requirements, 2nd Edition, Karl E. Wiegers.
If you are involved in managing requirements, you should own this book. Even if you don’t follow his approach to managing requirements, or don’t like how he deals with use cases, you should still read this book – at a minimum, you’ll know more about it than your pointy-haired boss who reads this blog, sees this post, and tells you that you must follow the Wiegers way.
The Best Way To Improve ROI is With Good Requirements (2006/01/06)
Here’s some leverage to use on the pointy-haired boss.
An article at IBM titled Calculating your return on investment from more effective requirements management throws out some stats from the Standish Group:
- 31% of all software projects are canceled before completed ($81 billion waste)
- 53% of projects will cost 189% of estimates
- 9% on time and on budget (large companies)
- 16% on time and on budget (small companies)
Top Five Usability Blunders (And Fixes) (2006/01/06)
Five easy steps to alienating your users with bad usability
- Fail to simplify a comprehensive interface so that new users can quickly climb past the suck threshold.
- Build an inconsistent UI layout or interaction design that varies throughout the application, creating a sense of dissonance for the users.
- Interrupt the user’s workflow with pop-ups and other modal interruptions.
- Limit expert users to following “new user†workflow, one tedius, repetitive step at a time when shortcuts would work.
- Don’t suggest solutions when an error message is displayed.
