[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 […]
Marketing / Process Improvement / Requirements / Requirements gathering / Software requirements specification
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From MRD to PRD: The key to defining a spec
They key to writing a great spec is knowing how to specify software that mets our customers’ needs. It can be a daunting task. First, we have to define what our customer needs. High level requirements are just requirements that are too vague or high-level to be directly actionable. “We […]
Communication / Lists / Presentation
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Top five presentation tips
From Start to End has a great post, Some tips on presentations. Very little we can add here – check it out. Our top five presentation tips (our first four picks are from the list behind the link) Know your audience. A key preparation – you have to have a […]
Process Improvement / Requirements / Software development / Software requirements specification / Testing
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Where Bugs Come From
In the Foundation series article on software processes we introduce a definition of software process as three steps – (decide, develop, deliver). That article will provide some contextfor this discussion, which dives more deeply into the three steps (decide, develop, deliver).
Software development / Test Automation / Testing
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Software testing series: A case study
This post is a test automation case study, but at a higher level.
We’ll talk about it in terms of defining the problem, and then discuss the objective (what we proposed to do to solve the problem), the strategy (how we went about doing it) and the tactics (how we executed the strategy). Since this happened in the real world, we’ll also identify the constraints within which we had to operate.
Communication / Requirements / Requirements management software / Software requirements specification / Writing
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Requirements Document Proliferation
Too many companies don’t document their requirements.
Worse still, too many companies over-document their requirements.
Foundation series / Process Improvement / Software development / Test Automation / Testing
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Foundation Series: Unit Testing of Software
Testing software is more than just manually banging around (also called monkey testing) and trying to break different parts of the software application. Unit testing is testing a subset of the functionality of a piece of software. A unit test is different from a system test in that it provides information only about a particular subset of the software. In our previous Foundation series post on black box and white box testing, we used the inspections that come bundled with an oil change as examples of unit tests.