How do you prevent analysis paralysis? That’s the question Barbara opens up for discussion on the Business Analyst Blog. The answer is somewhat simple. You stop as soon as you believe you have something that reasonably covers the goals (or use cases) that you are trying to address. When you […]
Requirements Details – How Much is Enough?
What is the right level of detail for writing requirements? What about for writing specifications (functional, non-functional requirements, etc)? The answer is that there is no one answer. But there are guidelines, and reasons to write more detail, or less detail – for any given product or project, and any […]
Product Managers and Information Flow
Product managers are often described as the hub or center of a software development organization. Saeed Khan takes umbrage with this under-appreciative image in an awesome article about information flow, product managers, and the SDLC.
Prioritization and Value Maximization
We all know the story about the emperor’s new clothes. I’ve been thinking about prioritization and scheduling, and as far as I know, no one is promoting that we maximize value – they (and we) have been promoting that we do the most valuable stuff first. Doing the most valuable […]
Elastic Users, Actors, and Roles
In About Face 2.0, Alan Cooper describes the elastic user as an ill-defined user who’s characteristics change to suit the needs of the developer – sometimes an expert and sometimes a novice. However, some of the otherwise good techniques for managing actors and use cases exacerbate this problem instead of […]
Ignoring The Requirements, Watching The Discussion
Almost a month ago, we published an article titled Broken Requirements Ecosystem. That article built on a discussion thread at Seilevel. Since that time, the original thread has grown, and a new one has been spawned at the Catalyze site. In short, the question was asked on the Seilevel forum- […]
Use Case Example With Business Rules
In our ongoing exploration of how to meld the worlds of business rules and requirements, we look at an example use case and see how to extract the business rules.
Separating Business Rules From Requirements Increases Agility
We’ve written in the past about why it is important to gather and manage requirements. In short, you avoid some costly mistakes, and fix others before they become too expensive. We’ve also started exploring how business requirements and business rules live and play together. But why should we bother to […]
Product Managers Adapt To Emerging Markets
Do you think the product managers at 3M ever expected people to make a mosaic of Elvis Presley out of Post-It Notes?