User Goals and Corporate Goals

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When defining requirements, you always start in the context of a goal – either a user goal or a corporate goal. You need to be aware of both. Having a positive user experience is important, and requires a user-centered understanding. Achieving your corporate goals might be in conflict with some […]

Advanced PERT Estimation

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Creating a PERT estimate for a single task is both easy and straightforward. Creating an estimate for a set of tasks is still easy, but requires a little bit of math. Combining PERT estimates for tasks is easy, but not as obvious. Roll up your sleeves and dive in.

Failure To Launch (Your Product)

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Jump forward in time to the day of your next big product launch (first release, new features, new market segment, etc). And your site/application crashes due to the “unexpected” demand. All you can do now is look for a bucket of water to put out the fire. What could you […]

Agile Non-Functional Requirements

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Just because your requirement is not a user story does not mean you have to throw it out when planning your next sprint. See one way (that is working) for managing non-functional requirements with an agile team.

User Stories and Use Cases

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User Stories are one of the key agile artifacts for helping implementation teams deliver the most important capabilities first. They differ from use cases in some important ways, but share more commonalities than you might think.

Stakeholders in a Barrel

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There’s really only one way to travel down a waterfall – in a barrel. A lot of people died this way, but some survived. Software projects have been predominantly waterfall projects since the start of software projects. And stakeholders rode down those projects, basically in a barrel. The people riding […]