We had a great interview with James Taylor a couple weeks ago, where we talked about his new book, Smart (Enough) Systems, co-authored with Neil Raden. James is an expert on decision management systems. I spent the late 1990s working on “rules-centric” software systems that allowed us to isolate rules […]
Enabling and Resisting Change
Change is a reality of our businesses and our customer’s businesses. Without change, there would be no need to purchase new software. Yet many teams seem to both resist and embrace change at the same time. They embrace change because change leads to demand for new software products. And they […]
Smart Enough Systems – Interview With James Taylor
Today we recorded an interview with James Taylor, co-author of Smart (Enough) Systems, How To Deliver Competitive Advantage by Automating Hidden Decisions. This book, written by James Taylor with Neil Raden comes out on Jun 29th (2007), and is available for pre-order from Amazon today. Our interview covers many of […]
Broken Requirements Ecosystem
There’s an interesting thread on Seilevel’s requirements forum about why developers don’t read the specs and how to fix this problem. Sometimes the developers throw away the requirements. And that’s bad. But it is a symptom. Something is broken at a higher level.
Change is Bad? Mistakes are Worse
CNET ran an article about a month ago about how Microsoft Live Hotmail – the upgrade/replacement of Hotmail failed to win a lot of converts. Microsoft ultimately had to deliver a “classic” version of the new code base to mimic the behavior of the old software. CNET’s analysis, while accurate, […]
APR: Updated Domain Model
More iteration in our agile project. In this article, we make several updates to the domain model (UML class diagram) based upon discussions on all of the articles in the series. More than a couple dozen in the last day. Thanks to everyone who has helped with feedback and encouragement […]
APR: Domain Model – UML Class Diagram
Along with design sketches and requirements, as part of the concurrent design and requirements development for our agile project, we have created a UML class diagram representing the domain. This iterative process allows us to incorporate the benefits of each perspective rapidly with the others in our race to prototype […]
APR: Prioritizing Use Cases – Vote Three Times
In our agile project case study we defined corporate goals and user personas, and from our understanding created a list of use case names. We refined those use cases into use case briefs, filtering out some of the use cases (for the first revision) narrowing the list to six use […]
APR: Use Case Briefs
Each of the use cases defined as part of our use case names post is described at a high level of detail here. The goal is to get a broad view of the domain for our project so that we can focus on the most important elements. This is a […]