Business rules are not requirements. Yet they are often gathered at the same time as requirements, from the same sources, by the same business analysts. And unfortunately, often documented in the same artifacts. In this article we look at some of the ways that business rules are commonly hidden inside […]
Business Analysis / Product Management / Requirements / Requirements gathering / Requirements Models
Posted on:
Analysis Paralysis and Agile Development
How do you prevent analysis paralysis? That’s the question Barbara opens up for discussion on the Business Analyst Blog. The answer is somewhat simple. You stop as soon as you believe you have something that reasonably covers the goals (or use cases) that you are trying to address. When you […]
Agile / Business Analysis / Product Management / Requirements / Requirements gathering / Requirements Models / Software development / Software requirements specification / Use Cases
Posted on:
Requirements Details – How Much is Enough?
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
Posted on:
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
Posted on:
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
Posted on:
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
Posted on:
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.
Agile / Product Management / Project Management / Requirements / Requirements Models / Software development / Use Cases
Posted on:
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 […]
Business Analysis / Product Management / Requirements / Requirements Models / Software development / Software requirements specification
Posted on:
Broken Requirements Ecosystem
There’s an interesting thread on Seilevel’s requirements forum about why developers don’t read the specs and how to fix this problem. Sometimes the developers throw away the requirements. And that’s bad. But it is a symptom. Something is broken at a higher level.