PEBBAK* error! Through a complete oversight / ommission / coma, the Non-Functional Requirements Equal Rights Amendment article was accidentally marked as private shortly after it was published. I was wondering why so many 404s happened when people tried to read it. Well, its back now. Enjoy it, and comment. It […]
Lists / Product Management / Requirements / Software requirements specification / Writing
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Writing Good Requirements – The Big Ten Rules
Pragmatic Marketing has a training seminar called Requirements That Work. In support of that, they provide a list of 8 characteristics of good requirements. We change one and add two more to round it out to The Big Ten Rules. Combine this with Michael’s ten tips for writing MRDs, and we’ve got a good handle on how to create a great MRD.
Product Management / Requirements
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Product Differentiation vs. Product Improvement
Build a better mousetrap. That’s what they used to say. But that doesn’t differentiate our products. Everyone is doing better, we need to do different.
Process Improvement / Requirements / Software development / Testing
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Non-Functional Requirements Equal Rights Amendment
We know how to deal with functional requirements. We know they are important – we can walk the dependency chain from goals to use cases to functional requirements. But how do we get to the non-functional requirements? Leathej1 points out the elephant in the room – non-functional requirements don’t get enough attention when it comes to testing. Let’s look into it some more…
Communication / Lists / Product Management / Requirements / Writing
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MRD Writing Tips – Ten from Michael Shrivathsan
Michael has posted five (plus five) tips on writing a market requirements document (MRD). Michael has written a good set of tips with detailed explanations and anecdotes. We have re-organized these tips into three general areas of guidance and provide our thoughts.
Agile / Prioritization / Product Management / Software development
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Product Managers Are Critical To Success
The product manager role is strategic. Product managers identify valuable problems in the market and determine which of them should be solved with software. They create a vision and strategy for solving those problems. Everything else happens in that context. James Shore has written a post on the importance of […]
Communication / Consulting / Interaction design / Product Management / Requirements / Requirements gathering / UX
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Requirements Gathering – Interviewing the Right People
How do we find out what someone wants when they don’t know what they want or what they can have? One of the best techniques for gathering requirements is to interview users. But which users?
Imagine aliens came to the planet and offered to solve our gasoline problem. How could we tell them what we wanted? We might say we wanted cars that run on clean renewable energy. The aliens might leave thinking “Oh well, I guess they didn’t want faster-than-light travel.”
Agile / Foundation series / Process Improvement / Software development / Test Automation / Testing
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Foundation Series: Functional Testing of Software
Functional Testing, also referred to as System Testing of software is the practice of testing the completed software to confirm that it meets the requirements defined for the software. A functional test is typically a test of user interactions, but can also involve communication with external systems. We contrast functional testing with unit testing. We also show how functional testing provides different benefits than unit testing.
Marketing / Product Management
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Marketing: Promotion, Education, and Inspiration
More great stuff from Kathy Sierra at Creating Passionate Users. Kathy contrasts the traditional budget-busting marketing promotion approach (one of the classic 4Ps) with a nickel-and-dime approach to inspiring and educating users and customers. We’ve talked about the importance of persuasion in the new Ps. Kathy’s stuff is right on the money for this one.