Interaction design / Requirements / Requirements Models / Software development / Software requirements specification / Use Cases / UX

Interaction Design and Structured Requirements

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subtitle: Wiegers and Cooper assimilated
Wiegers promotes structured requirements. Cooper touts Interaction Design. Both have great ideas. Both “wave their hands” at parts of the process. In this post, we’ll talk about how to combine the two philosophies to get the best of both worlds.

Interaction design / Prioritization / Software development / Software requirements specification / UX

How To Create Personas for Goal Driven Development

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We mentioned the creation of personas in our overview of the interaction design process. In this post we will talk in more detail about how to create them. We will cover identification and prioritization of the personas, defining the corporate and personal goals for the personas, and creating the anecdotal stories that give each persona an identity against which we can make design decisions. Scenarios are also defined for the primary personas, which drive the creation of the functional requirements specification.

Design / Interaction design / Requirements / Requirements gathering / Software development / Software requirements specification / UX

Interaction Design Process Overview

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Interaction design, as described by Alan Cooper in The Inmates are Running the Asylum, is a process for designing software by focusing on the most important users. Unlike traditional requirements gathering and solution design processes, interaction design focuses on the goals of a specific class of users, represented as a persona. Those goals are considered when defining scenarios that represent how the primary persona will use the software. The combination of goals and scenarios leads to design artifacts and a functional specification. We will explore these steps in more detail in this post.

Marketing / Requirements / Software development

We must sell the software first

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We write a lot about value-driven prioritization of software requirements. It’s easy (when defining requirements) to forget that we have to sell the product before anyone gets any value from it. With internal use software for large companies (like enterprise software, intranets, erp systems), “sell it” means “get high user adoption rates.” High user rates are key to getting ROI when process-improvement is one of the targets of the software.

Project Management / Requirements / Software development

Managing scope creep is not a zero-sum game

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We’ve never had a project where we didn’t have to address scope creep. As a supplier, we prioritize loyalty and relationships above incremental profitability. Project management techniques for addressing scope creep do us a disservice by starting with the presumption that resources have to be managed in a zero-sum game (every new feature must displace an existing feature). In this post we will talk about the opportunity to strengthen the relationship with our customer as part of addressing scope creep. It is not a zero-sum game.

Requirements

Software requirements for migration projects

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A very common enterprise software project is the replacement of a legacy system – migrating functionality to a new system. This type of project usually has very different constraints than a “new application” project. We will look at the characteristics of migration projects to understand how we should approach them to assure success.

Process Improvement / Requirements / Software development

Prioritizing software requirements across releases

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When prioritizing requirements for the first release of our software, we’ve stressed the importance of including 100% of the ‘must have’ requirements in the first release of the software. We’ve also used Kano analysis to categorize requirements as ‘must be’, ‘surprise and delight’, and ‘more is better’ requirements. In this post we’ll talk about an approach to allocating these requirements across releases.