Kelly Odell posted a single-sheet marketing plan template, after being frustrated with the massive templates that others have promoted in the past. John Sviokla recently wrote about how the 4-P’s of marketing are changing to the 5-P’s of marketing. Marcus Ting-A-Kee found John’s essay and wrote about it yesterday. Guy Kawasaki suggested that Kelly adapt his template to John’s new approach. Kelly chose to mix the best of both worlds. We add our own spin at the end.
Communication / Product Management / Requirements / Software requirements specification / Writing
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Requirements Documents – One Man’s Trash
…Is another man’s treasure. There are many different ways to document requirements when developing software. And there is a proliferation of requirements documents – MRD, PRD, SRS, FRS and design documents. Everyone has a perspective on what each document represents, and each person on the team has a unique perspective on what questions the document answers.
Agile / Software development
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Agile Values – Alistair Cockburn on the Agile Manifesto
IT Conversations has an interview (mp3 41min) with Alistair Cockburn (pronounced koh-bern) that makes for a great listen. Doug Kaye hosts a great conversation with Alistair, discussing several topics, including the four principles of Agile development. Alistair explains that the wording is precise and intentional, and represents four sets of preferences, not four absolutes.
Agile / Lists / Process Improvement / Software development / Test Automation / Testing
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Ten Essential Practices of Continuous Integration
Martin Fowler has identified the key process elements of making Continuous Integration work. You could even argue that they are the elements that define Continuous Integration (done correctly). We include his list and our thoughts below:
Agile / Foundation series / Process Improvement / Software development / Test Automation / Testing
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Foundation Series: Continuous Integration
Continuous Integration is the software development and quality process where all team members merge their code and verifies it frequently – at least daily. This verification project includes both an automated build process and automated testing. The main benefits of continuous integration come from risk-reduction and cost-reduction.
Requirements
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Non-Functional Requirements List
Marcus is building a great reference on non-functional requirements at From Start to End. He’s created a series of articles, and keeps adding more. Each post focuses on a single type of non-functional requirement. He just put up an index page for all of his posts, and he’ll be keeping that page updated as he adds more content.
Agile / Product Management / Requirements / Requirements gathering / Software development
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The Agile Dragon
When Alan Cooper and Kent Beck debated the benefits of eXtreme Programming versus Interaction Design, they disagreed on a lot of things. One thing they agreed on is that Agile processes are designed to minimize the impact of changing requirements. Cooper believes that it makes more sense to minimize future change by understanding the requirements better up front. Beck believes that the requirements can not be understood by the team until something is delivered. Beck’s point is that the customer doesn’t understand the requirements until he has something in his hands. We’ve shown how this is both a strength and a weakness for Agile in the real world. In The Hobbit, the dragon Smaug was missing a scale on his belly, that made him vulnerable. Agile processes have a similar weak spot.
Agile / Product Management / Project Management / Software development
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Agile’s Biggest Strength is Agile’s Biggest Weakness
Agile works because it is designed to help teams adapt to changes in direction. Agile is designed to minimize the pain of changing requirements. Agile proponents believe the premise that requirements will change and no amount of upfront planning will impact that. They believe that the requirements simply do not exist until after something has been built. Agile processes save a lot of time by not doing big upfront requirements gathering or design work. They also don’t involve big up-front planning. They do small planning work. And they do it again and again, throughout the project. This works because they minimize wasted planning effort.
Requirements / Software requirements specification
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Joel Spolsky Speaks Specs
It seems that specs are like flossing: everybody knows they should be writing them, but nobody does.
Another for the wish I had said that list. Joel Sposky wrote a four part series on writing functional specifications in Oct 2000. Joel’s opening position is that all projects lasting more than a week, or with more than one developer, will be completed faster with specs than without them. He presents three giant reasons to use a requirements document as part of developing software
Three Giant Reasons