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 […]
Business Analysis / Expert systems / Prioritization / Product Management / Project Management / Requirements / Requirements Models / ROI / Use Cases
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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 […]
Business Analysis / Product Management / Requirements / Requirements Models / Use Cases
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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 […]
Business Analysis / Product Management / Requirements / Requirements Models / Software development / Software requirements specification
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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- […]
Business Analysis / Business Rules / Product Management / Requirements / Requirements Models / Use Cases
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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.
Business Analysis / Business Rules / Product Management / Requirements / Requirements gathering
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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 […]
Business Analysis / Data management / Product Management / Requirements / Requirements gathering
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Business Rules And Requirements – Early Thoughts
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 […]
Agile / Business Analysis / Product Management / Requirements / Software development
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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 […]
Agile / Product Management / Project Management / Requirements / Requirements Models / Software development / Use Cases
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Benefits of Agile Story Decomposition
When you plan a release, agile user stories, or classic use cases are the best sized pieces to use in the planning – from the perspective of your customers. Each user story can be further decomposed into a set of specifications, and those into development tasks. Development tasks are the […]