Stephen Turbek, at Boxes and Arrows, tells us how to get better results from our wireframes. Wireframe prototyping can provide feedback early in the design cycle, reducing costs and improving the quality of the final software. By putting a little flesh on the bone, we can get even better results.
Design / Product Management / Requirements / Software development / Software requirements specification / Writing
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Writing Design-Free Requirements
One of the ten big rules of writing a good MRD is writing requirements that do not specify design. How do we specify enough detail to be actionable without constraining the engineering team? How do we trust our developers to do the right thing? The Big Rule of Avoiding Design-Agnosticism […]
Design / Interaction design / Requirements / Requirements gathering / Software development / Software requirements specification / UX
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Interaction Design Process Overview
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.
Agile / Design / Interaction design / Outsourcing / Requirements / Software development / UX
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Software design and specification and making movies
Alan Cooper presents the analogy that software development is like making movies in his book, The Inmates are Running the Asylum. Cooper is presenting the analogy in the context of validating the business case for investing in interaction design, but it holds true for requirements as well.
Design / Process Improvement / Software development / Test Automation / Testing
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Software Testing Series: Organizing a Test Suite with Tags Part Three
This is the third in a three-part post about using tags as a means to organize an automated unit test suite.
Part 3 of this post can be read as a standalone article. If it were, it would be titled Design elements of an automated unit test framework using tags. If you’re only reading this post and not parts 1 and 2, pretend that this is the title.
Design / Process Improvement / Requirements / Software development
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Describing the Software Development Process
Software development involves determining what to develop, documenting this decision, determining how to develop it, and actually developing it.We present a framework for describing this process in terms of layers of activity. Many people use pyramid analogies, which show the magnitude of effort in each layer (lines of code versus lines of requirements, for example). Many other people use inverted pyramids to reflect the importance (or impact) of work done at different layers (a sentance defining a strategy has more impact than a line of code). Some people show PERT diagrams of waterfalls or pretty circular arrows charts showing iterative lifecycles, or any of many good analogies.
Design / Lists / Software development / Usability / UX
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Top five usability blunders (and fixes)
Five easy steps to alienating your users with bad usability Fail to simplify a comprehensive interface so that new users can quickly climb past the suck threshold. Build an inconsistent UI layout or interaction design that varies throughout the application, creating a sense of dissonance for the users. Interrupt the […]