Agile / Product Management

The Potential of Agile

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The pop-culture concept of a silver bullet – a simple solution to a hard problem – is a dangerous idea. It can be used to over-promise, and doom a team to under-delivery. When an executive, too far removed from what makes creating products hard thinks of “agile” as a silver […]

Agile / Communication / Process Improvement / Project Management / Software development / Testing

Crossing The Desert With Bad Project Planning

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Johanna Rothman recently wrote an article with a poignant introduction: “A project team focuses on an interim milestone, works like the devil to meet that milestone. They meet the milestone, look up, and realize they’re not at the end of the project–they still have to finish the darn thing. They’re living the Crossing the Desert syndrome.” Fixing it isn’t enough – how do we prevent it from happening?

Business Analysis / Requirements / Requirements gathering

Estimating the Effort of Documenting an As-Is Process

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Estimating the gathering of requirements is hard. Not as hard as scheduling innovation, but easier than estimating implementation effort. One step in gathering requirements is often the documentation of the “as-is” process – how things exist today. We provide a framework for building those estimates – making the job a little bit easier.

Requirements / Software requirements specification

Joel Spolsky Speaks Specs

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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