This is my requirements document. There are many like it, but this one is mine. My requirements document is my life. [Kubrick, with some editing]. Michael provides a comparison of requirements documentation formats seen in the wild. A good companion to our earlier piece, Michael provides some “what to expect” guidance about how different companies use the different documentation formats. Check it out.
Agile / Process Improvement / Software development
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Making Agile Offshore Teams Work
Agile processes stress communication and colocation. Splitting a team into on and offshore resources inhibits the first and prevents the second. Teams struggle to resolve this apparent conflict of interest. Applying best practices (for any team) to address these challenges makes it possible. Martin Fowler provides us with great guidance based on years of experience with his company.
Business Process Modeling / Requirements / Requirements gathering
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BPMN Diagrams – Boundary Intermediate Message Events
Intermediate message events can be placed on an activity boundary in BPMN. This use represents a form of exception handling for a task or sub-process, in response to an incoming message. This is a very different behavior than the ones we previously described, which show how to use intermediate message events in the course of the normal sequence flow of a business process.
Administrivia / Business Process Modeling / Requirements / Requirements gathering
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Yesterday’s BPMN Post Was A Big Fat Lie
Yesterday’s post contained a pretty significant mistake (aka “Big Fat Lie”). I showed a diagram that was in violation of the BPMN specification for intermediate message events. The post has been corrected, showing both the “bad” instructions, and the associated corrections. The proper way to use intermediate message events within […]
Business Process Modeling / Requirements / Requirements gathering
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BPMN Diagrams – Flowing Intermediate Message Events
One of the 9 intermediate events in BPMN is the message intermediate event. There are two ways to use the message intermediate event, as an element in the sequence flow, or as an attachment to the boundary of an activity for exception processing. See how to use message intermediate events in a sequence flow. [Updated with correction of glaring error on Aug 22nd, 2006]
Business Process Modeling / Requirements / Requirements gathering
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BPMN Diagrams – Undefined Intermediate Events
There are 9 different intermediate events in BPMN. One of them, called the none intermediate event, is “undefined” in that it doesn’t specify a distinct behavior. Unlike the other intermediate events, the none intermediate event has a single interpretation, and will only be used with a specific methodology.
Software development / Test Automation / Testing
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John Henry, Manual Tester
There’s a piece of North American folklore about John Henry, who was a manual laborer during the expansion of the railroads in our country. His job was being replaced by steam-driven heavy equipment, as the railroad industry applied technology to become more efficient. The same dynamics are happening today with manual testers. We need to make sure that manual testers avoid John Henry’s fate – read on to see why.
Slightly off-topic
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Version Numbering Makes Release Planning Harder
David, at 37signals, writes an interesting post about changing the way their company is managing the naming of new versions of their Backpack information manager product.
David starts with the premise that there is too much feature-creep when scheduling deliveries of software updates.
Business Process Modeling / Requirements / Requirements gathering
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BPMN Diagrams – Introduction to Intermediate Events
Intermediate events are one of the more complex and expressive elements of BPMN diagrams. Here we introduce the different intermediate events.