UML Class Diagrams can be used not only for documenting software design, but for documenting software requirements. One of the challenges in writing clear, unambiguous requirements is being precise about what a particular word means. This is especially true with symbolic terms like “quote” or “customer” – where everyone knows […]
Agile / Business Analysis / Product Management / Requirements / Requirements Models / Software development / Use Cases
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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 […]
Business Analysis / Product Management / Requirements / Requirements Models
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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.
Business Analysis / Product Management / Requirements / Requirements gathering / Requirements Models / Software requirements specification
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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? […]
Business Analysis / Interaction design / Prioritization / Product Management / Requirements / Requirements Models / ROI / Software development / Use Cases / UX
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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 […]
Business Analysis / Interface Design / Product Management / Requirements / Requirements Models / Usability / UX
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Global Actor Hierarchies and Personas
We use actor hierarchies to organize the different users of a system. Different people play different roles, and thus do different jobs. We use different actors to identify and organize those people. When deploying a system globally, we usually discover people that do the same jobs, but do them differently. […]
Business Analysis / Process Flow / Requirements / Requirements Models / UML Modeling
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How To Draw an Asynchronous Process
Documenting processes is something most business analysts have to do. The goal of documenting the process is to communicate requirements. By establishing a shared understanding of the process, you can establish the context for the requirements. Easy processes are easy to draw and understand. When documenting a more complex process, […]
Business Analysis / Business Rules / Data management / Requirements / Requirements Models
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Glossary of Terms
Some books on how to write and manage requirements mention using a glossary. Most books on requirements don’t go into enough detail about either the importance of a glossary of terms, or the precise use of the glossary of terms. Or if they do, they under-emphasize the benefits of a […]
Business Analysis / Business Process Modeling / Business Rules / Product Management / Requirements / Requirements Models / Use Cases
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Global Processes and Business Rules
We’ve written before about the importance of separating rules from requirements, particularly in use cases. We wrote that with the goal in mind of reducing the costs of system maintenance. Low-level rules like decision, calculation and inference rules tend to change frequently – and independently of other requirements. So a […]