Incremental delivery planning is not an oxymoron. You just plan the soon-to-happen tasks in detail, and keep the distant tasks more vague. Does this make sense? Rolling-Wave Planning Johanna Rothman has posted an article that provides a good introduction to rolling-wave planning. She explains that she manages incremental projects with […]
Product Management / Requirements / Requirements Models / Use Cases
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The Impact of Change and Use Cases
Market requirements change. These changes impact the use cases that support the changing requirements. Functional requirements change. These changes impact the use cases that they support. How can we leverage use cases to manage these changes? And how can we manage changes to use cases?
IIBA / Organizations / Process Improvement
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Business Analyst BOK 1.6 Just Released
The IIBA (International Institute of Business Analysis) has just released version 1.6 of A Guide to the Business Analysis Body of Knowledge, or the BA BOK. This new release adds over 100 pages of content and is the first “essentially complete” version.
Project Management / ROI / Slightly off-topic
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Iron Triangle Kills in Boston…
… Skyline Unharmed Short-sighted demands on software teams usually don’t kill people. Software development is often described with a construction analogy. The Big Dig construction project was under exactly that kind of pressure. On July 10th, 12 tons of tunnel ceiling collapsed and killed a motorist. On July 20th, Mitt […]
Communication / Consulting / Product Management / Project Management / Requirements / Requirements Models / Use Cases
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Communicating A Release Schedule With Use Cases
We manage release schedules with project management. We manage customer expectations with consulting skills. How do we manage customer expectations about release schedules? With Use Cases. Background We started a series of posts exploring why we apply use cases as part of product management, identifying 8 goals for which use […]
Business Process Modeling / Requirements / Requirements gathering
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Foundation Series: Business Process Modeling
Business Process Modeling allows us to increase our understanding of business processes and improve communication with stakeholders and implementation teams. Business analysts will create diagrams that represent business processes. These diagrams can be used to elicit requirements, define scope, and improve communication within the team.
Communication / Product Management / Requirements / Requirements Models / Software requirements specification / Use Cases
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Communicating Intent With Implementers
Giving a functional spec to developers and testers is not sufficient for creating great software. To a developer, a spec is only the what and not the why. And for a tester, the software requirements specification is neither. Use cases provide the why that explains the intent of the system for the implementation team.
Communication / Product Management / Requirements / Requirements Models / Use Cases
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Communicating Intent With Stakeholders
We can build a prototype of what the stakeholders don’t want, and then get feedback and fix it. Or we can review use cases of what we intend to build, confirm that each stakeholder wants it, and build it right the first time.
Foundation series / Requirements / Requirements gathering / Software requirements specification
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Foundation Series: Data Dictionary Definition
What is a data dictionary and how is it used when communicating and managing requirements?