Flashback: This Week in the Past on Tyner Blain [Feb 16]

building reflection

A look back at the best from this week in the past.

Software Requirements: Processes and Roles

two roles for one person

Our previous post, Requirements vs design – which is which and why, describes our position on which parts of the software development process are requirements-activities, and which parts are design activities. The debate among professionals about these distinctions is ongoing, and continues in the comments on that post. The length of the debate, combined with the skills of those debating demonstrates that it isn’t a black and white issue.

In this post, we will try and explore the reasons why this debate is ongoing. We will do that by exploring the symbolism of the terms involved, as well as the roles of different members of the software development team.

Writing Requirements Unambiguously

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Writing requirements without ambiguity

This is one of the harder parts of writing good requirements. Marcus tells us to avoid it with a good example here. Jerry Aubin at Seilevel has written an outstanding post on the subject, The art and science of disambiguation. Jerry starts his post with a gripping example from Weinberg and Gause

Writing Functional Requirements to Support Use Cases

writing
Background:
In our previous post, Sample use case examples, we created two informal use cases. The use cases were written to support product requirements defined as part of a project to reduce test suite maintenace costs. In this post, we will define functional requirements that support these use cases. This process is an example of using structured requirements, applied to a small real world project.

  • Scott Sehlhorst

    Scott Sehlhorst is a product management and strategy consultant with over 30 years of experience in engineering, software development, and business. Scott founded Tyner Blain in 2005 to focus on helping companies, teams, and product managers build better products. Follow him on LinkedIn, and connect to see how Scott can help your organization.

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