Do you recognize this early logo from Amazon.com? Future Now has a great article detailing how Amazon evolved their “add to shopping cart” implementation. From reviewing this summary of the evolution of one feature, we can see that Amazon decided there was value in reinvention. The improved the way their […]
C.R.A.C.K. Users Are Addictive
Barry Boehm, inventor of the spiral model of software development, may also be the originator of the CRACK acronym for the type of users we want on our projects. When defining (and executing on) projects, we don’t just want CRACK users, we want CRACK stakeholders. And we want them to […]
Cockburn Affirms: Use Cases Rule for Agile!
We’ve been promoting use cases as the right way to approach agile requirements, and in a recent article, Alistair Cockburn stresses the importance of use cases. Over the last three years, he has found that teams that avoid use cases consistently run into the same three problems. We defer, of […]
The NICE Way To Think About Requirements
Too much information about requirements or too little? Too much documentation or too little? Use the NICE framework to get it just right.
SRS Plan of Attack
How do you approach starting a small requirements project as part of a large initiative within a massive enterprise? Do you boil the ocean? Your customer knows she needs “requirements” to give to her development team. She asks you – what will you deliver, and how long will it take? […]
Use Case Management is a Tough Balancing Act
Learning how to write use cases can be tough, but it is simple compared to the balancing act of determining which use cases to write and how to manage the expectations of all the stakeholders that are involved. It can be a difficult balancing act to prioritize use cases to […]
Requirements: Knowledge and Understanding
[photo by Henkster] Writing good requirements is more than just about following a set of rules. You can capture knowledge about your goals and your product with a set of well crafted requirements. But to truly write good requirements, you have to gain a level of understanding that surpasses knowledge. […]
You Are Creating Bugs In Your Software
No matter how good your quality process is, you are introducing bugs. This article reviews the places where bugs are introduced in the software development process (from stakeholders to users), and reviews ways to address those bugs.
Why You Should Test Your Requirements
We’ve written before about several characteristics of well written requirements, and one of those characteristics is testability. Ahamad has written an list of 10 tests of requirements, with an emphasis on assessing the testability of the requirements. The testability of the requirement determines if the resultant product can be tested […]