A look back at the best from this week in the past.
Marketing Truths – Don’t Tell the Developers
Marketing is as foreign to most software developers as flying is to fish. We’ve found a list of ten truths of marketing, and we’re secretly sharing them with the developers who hang out here. Shhh. Don’t tell anyone in marketing.
Brainstorming – Making Something Out of Everything
Previously, we talked about brainstorming as one of the best elicitation techniques for gathering requirements. Here are some details about how to facilitate a general brainstorming session with a group of people in 5 easy steps (and then another 5 easy steps).
Seven to ten people is a good number to pull together in a brainstorming session. With creative and vocal people, a smaller number can work.
Top Five Six Requirements Gathering Tips
Interviewing, Brainstorming, Documenting Use Cases, Prototyping, Analyzing Documents, and Business Process Modeling
How to Interview When Gathering Requirements
We previously stressed the importance of understanding why something is a requirement. Unfortunately, we can’t just ask “why why why?!†until we reach the end of the chain. This won’t be any more effective for us now than it was when we were in kindergarden. Eventually, our listeners will get frustrated, or worse, defensive.
Understanding why is still our goal – but we have to be smart about our interviews to get this information. In our previous post, we identify interviewing as a key technique for eliciting requirements. Interviewing is the cornerstone of our elicitation techniques – even if we gather the bulk of our information in group meetings, we have to follow-up, clarify and validate with individuals. There’s truth behind the old saw that nothing good is designed by committee.
