http://www.dilbert.com/comics/dilbert/archive/dilbert-20060129.html We won’t copy the image of the cartoon – but we’ll tell you that it opens with Alice: “I’ll need to know your requirements before I start to design the software.” ObRelatedTopic: How to interview when gathering requirements Great Dilbert products The latest book (Nov 2005) from Scott Adams, […]
Consulting / Lists / People management / Requirements
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Five Measures of Product Manager Performance
Joy posted a really good article last week at Seilevel’s requirements defined blog, Measuring product manager performance on internal system products. Her post is a followup to an extensive and heated debate that happened last fall on the Austin PMM forum. It’s a great forum to subscribe to – a […]
Administrivia
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Tyner Blain in the Google Toobar
Tyner Blain can now be viewed thru the Google Toolbar! In the top of the sidebar (on the right) is a link to automatically add Tyner Blain to your Google Toolbar. As of today, it is only supported for IE users, but Google is now a supporter of firefox, so […]
Design / Process Improvement / Requirements / Software development
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Describing the Software Development Process
Software development involves determining what to develop, documenting this decision, determining how to develop it, and actually developing it.We present a framework for describing this process in terms of layers of activity. Many people use pyramid analogies, which show the magnitude of effort in each layer (lines of code versus lines of requirements, for example). Many other people use inverted pyramids to reflect the importance (or impact) of work done at different layers (a sentance defining a strategy has more impact than a line of code). Some people show PERT diagrams of waterfalls or pretty circular arrows charts showing iterative lifecycles, or any of many good analogies.
Requirements / Software requirements specification
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How to manage data when writing requirements
Don’t trigger a data explosion with enumerated requirements. Managing requirements can be tricky when it comes to managing data (information). The difference between a good approach and a bad approach can add up to hundreds of hours of labor over the life of a project. In our picture, we show […]
Communication / Consulting
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Top Five Ways To Be A Better Listener
Effective listening skills yield great requirements The better you are at listening, the more people will want to tell you. If you’ve ever watched The Actor’s Studio, you’ve heard over and over that the most important skill in acting is reflective listening. A marriage counselor will tell you that step […]
Polls / Process Improvement / Requirements
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Take this poll or we’ll shoot this kitten
[Ed: If you read Tyner Blain via RSS you have to visit the site to vote in the poll. Also, we’ll use a camera.] An earlier post on CRUD use cases started a fantastic debate (both public and private) about what it means to write great software, and if it’s […]
Lists / Polls / Requirements / Requirements Models / Use Cases
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Top Ten Use Case Mistakes
The top ten use case mistakes We’re reiterating the top five use case mistakes from Top five use case blunders and adding five more. For details on the first five, go back to that post. There’s also a poll at the end of this post – vote for the worst […]
Requirements / Software requirements specification / Writing
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A requirements documentation mistake
Learn from an early mistake of mine At a previous employer, the first time I played the role of requirements manager (technically, program manager – with responsibility for the functional spec), I made a bunch of mistakes – this post is about one of them. The setup We were engaged […]