One of the goals of agile software development is to deliver value quickly and iteratively. One of the most effective ways to begin the software development process is with use cases. To deliver with agility, you start with the most valuable use case, bang it out, and then move on to the next most valuable use case. How do you know which use case is the most valuable if you haven’t defined all the use cases first?
Prioritization / Project Management / Requirements
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Writing Incomplete Requirements
Writing Complete requirements is one of the twelve elements of writing good requirements. Sometimes, you don’t have the opportunity to finish the job, and are forced to write incomplete requirements. How would you go about doing that?
Business Analysis / Product Management / Requirements / Requirements gathering
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Three Types of Requirements Gathering
There are many different activities that are a form of requirements gathering. So many that it can be difficult to determine which approach to use in what circumstance. By classifying requirements gathering into three different types of activities we can simplify the choices.
Flashback
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Flashback: A Year Ago This Week on Tyner Blain [2006-03-24]
A look back at the best from a year ago.
Design / Software development / Usability / UX
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Don’t Make Your Products Too Simple
Joshua Ledwell wrote a short article expressing his perspective on designing software that is neither too simple nor too complex. He also links to some excellent other articles on the topic.
Business Analysis / Product Management / Requirements / Requirements gathering / Requirements management software / Requirements Models / UML Modeling
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UML Statecharts and Documenting Business Rules
In yesterday’s article we compared use cases and UML statecharts as tools for discovering business rules. James Taylor asked a question about how we would document those rules, and then followed up my comment response with an article about business rules and RUP. In this article we move the conversation slightly forward – recognizing that we’re slowly entering the ocean of business process management.
Business Analysis / Product Management / Requirements / Requirements gathering / Requirements Models / UML Modeling / Use Cases
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Use Case vs. UML Statechart – Business Rules
What is the better requirements management model for capturing business rules? The use case, or the UML statechart? In this article, we explore how customer orders are submitted and processed, and contrast how use cases and statecharts expose and document business requirements and business rules.
Agile / Software development
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Outside Reading: Mary and Tom Poppendieck on Lean Software Development
InfoQ has an outstanding interview with Mary and Tom Poppendieck about Lean Software Development. One of the longer interviews on the topic, and full of great content. You can watch streaming video of the interview, jump around to the answers of specific questions, or read the full transcript – great format for presenting a long form interview like this.
Business Analysis / Business Process Modeling / Product Management / Requirements / Requirements gathering / Requirements Models / Use Cases
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Use Case vs. Process Flow – Failure Handling
Should you use use cases or process flow diagrams to document business requirements? At some level, they both document the same thing, they just document it differently. The best requirements will come from doing both – but what if you are forced to choose one? What are the tradeoffs between use cases and process flows? In this article we look at the documentation of failure handling.