Business Analysis / Product Management / Requirements / Requirements gathering / Requirements management software / Requirements Models / UML Modeling

UML Statecharts and Documenting Business Rules

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In yesterday’s article we compared use cases and UML statecharts as tools for discovering business rules. James Taylor asked a question about how we would document those rules, and then followed up my comment response with an article about business rules and RUP. In this article we move the conversation slightly forward – recognizing that we’re slowly entering the ocean of business process management.

CMMI / Process Improvement / Requirements / Requirements management software / Software development

CMMI Levels and Requirements Management Maturity Introduction

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CMMI (Capability Maturity Model Integration) is a description of the level of enlightenment of a process. It is essentially a measure of the quality and capability of a process. There are five categories, into one of which every process will fall. IBM took a similar approach to defining the requirements management process. In this series of posts, we will marry the two frameworks.

Business Analysis / Business Process Modeling / IIBA / Organizations / Requirements management software

2007 – The Year of the Business Analyst

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Outsourcing is gaining momentum not only as a way to reduce costs, but as a way to create global teams. This trend is driving an increase in demand for business analysts. The change in perspective is driving companies to think about how they manage their business in new ways, and driving interest in new tools for business analysts to achieve these goals.

Process Improvement / Product Management / Requirements / Requirements management software / ROI / Software development

Companies Will Waste $1B This Year on Software Tools

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Gartner reported that companies spent $3.7 Billion USD on application development tools in 2004, with a 5% annual growth rate. The Standish Group has shown that 40% to 60% of project failures are due to requirements failures. At least 1/3 of the money spent on getting more efficient at coding is being wasted – it should be spent on writing the right software.

Agile / Interaction design / Process Improvement / Product Management / Requirements / Requirements management software / Software development / Use Cases / UX

Gartner research on Agile Requirements Definition and Management (RDM)

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Gartner has a research report available for $95, titled Agile Requirements Definition and Management Will Benefit Application Development (report #G00126310 Apr 2005). The report is 7 pages long and makes an interesting read. Gartner makes a set of predictions for 2009 about requirements definition and management (RDM) systems, and the software created with RDM tools. Gartner misattributes several benefits of good process to RDM tools. We give them a 3.5/7 for their analysis – check out the details here.

Interaction design / Requirements / Requirements management software / Software development / UX

Persona Grata

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Different people approach the same goal very differently. When we don’t truly identify our users, we end up with software that dehumanizes, waters-down, and otherwise fails to succeed at anything more than grudgingly tolerated functionality. Even worse, we may ignore the needs of our key demographic, resulting in software failure. When we use personas instead of generic use cases, we can avoid both the misery of a failed product and mediocrity of marginal success.