Pragmatic Marketing has a training seminar called Requirements That Work. In support of that, they provide a list of 8 characteristics of good requirements. We change one and add two more to round it out to The Big Ten Rules. Combine this with Michael’s ten tips for writing MRDs, and we’ve got a good handle on how to create a great MRD.
Product Management / Requirements
Posted on:
Product Differentiation vs. Product Improvement
Build a better mousetrap. That’s what they used to say. But that doesn’t differentiate our products. Everyone is doing better, we need to do different.
Process Improvement / Requirements / Software development / Testing
Posted on:
Non-Functional Requirements Equal Rights Amendment
We know how to deal with functional requirements. We know they are important – we can walk the dependency chain from goals to use cases to functional requirements. But how do we get to the non-functional requirements? Leathej1 points out the elephant in the room – non-functional requirements don’t get enough attention when it comes to testing. Let’s look into it some more…
Communication / Lists / Product Management / Requirements / Writing
Posted on:
MRD Writing Tips – Ten from Michael Shrivathsan
Michael has posted five (plus five) tips on writing a market requirements document (MRD). Michael has written a good set of tips with detailed explanations and anecdotes. We have re-organized these tips into three general areas of guidance and provide our thoughts.
Agile / Prioritization / Product Management / Software development
Posted on:
Product Managers Are Critical To Success
The product manager role is strategic. Product managers identify valuable problems in the market and determine which of them should be solved with software. They create a vision and strategy for solving those problems. Everything else happens in that context. James Shore has written a post on the importance of […]
Communication / Consulting / Interaction design / Product Management / Requirements / Requirements gathering / UX
Posted on:
Requirements Gathering – Interviewing the Right People
How do we find out what someone wants when they don’t know what they want or what they can have? One of the best techniques for gathering requirements is to interview users. But which users?
Imagine aliens came to the planet and offered to solve our gasoline problem. How could we tell them what we wanted? We might say we wanted cars that run on clean renewable energy. The aliens might leave thinking “Oh well, I guess they didn’t want faster-than-light travel.”
Communication / Product Management / Requirements / Software requirements specification / Writing
Posted on:
Requirements Documents – One Man’s Trash
…Is another man’s treasure. There are many different ways to document requirements when developing software. And there is a proliferation of requirements documents – MRD, PRD, SRS, FRS and design documents. Everyone has a perspective on what each document represents, and each person on the team has a unique perspective on what questions the document answers.
Requirements
Posted on:
Non-Functional Requirements List
Marcus is building a great reference on non-functional requirements at From Start to End. He’s created a series of articles, and keeps adding more. Each post focuses on a single type of non-functional requirement. He just put up an index page for all of his posts, and he’ll be keeping that page updated as he adds more content.
Agile / Product Management / Requirements / Requirements gathering / Software development
Posted on:
The Agile Dragon
When Alan Cooper and Kent Beck debated the benefits of eXtreme Programming versus Interaction Design, they disagreed on a lot of things. One thing they agreed on is that Agile processes are designed to minimize the impact of changing requirements. Cooper believes that it makes more sense to minimize future change by understanding the requirements better up front. Beck believes that the requirements can not be understood by the team until something is delivered. Beck’s point is that the customer doesn’t understand the requirements until he has something in his hands. We’ve shown how this is both a strength and a weakness for Agile in the real world. In The Hobbit, the dragon Smaug was missing a scale on his belly, that made him vulnerable. Agile processes have a similar weak spot.