The hardest long term challenge in eliciting requirements is improving our ability to do it. The hardest short term challenge in gathering requirements is getting all of them. We have a lot of techniques for gathering requirements, from interviewing to brainstorming to researching. How do we know we defined all of the requirements? Everyone who manages requirements knows the value of validating requirements. But validation leaves a blind spot as it looks backwards instead of forwards. We propose to do exactly the opposite.
Product Manager Role Definition
Michael has posted a great definition of the product manager role on his blog, Product Management and Product Marketing – A Definition. He covers a whole host of activities in six seperate areas. Some of the responsibilities, while not product management, are often the responsibility of the product manager. It’s a good real-world assessment of what product managers are often asked to do.
Four Application Development Outsourcing Models
On March 30th CIO magazine published an article titled Do’s and Don’ts of Outsourcing Benchmarks. The article spurred us to write about outsourcing models for product development – it is otherwise unrelated, but interesting. [2015 Edit: The CIO article has been removed, check out these lessons from successes and failures […]
Passing the Wrong Whitebox Tests
We’ve talked about the value of using whitebox testing in our Software testing series post on whitebox testing. What we haven’t explored is how to make sure we are creating the right tests. We have to validate our tests against the requirements. This post shows where the flaw is in the typical whitebox testing process, and how to fix it.
A reader emailed us with the comment, “It’s been my experience that developers can’t test their own code.” Their problem was that they were missing a link in the software development chain (missing a step in the process).
Product management success in the conceptual age
The information age is ending and the conceptual age is beginning. In A Whole New Mind, Daniel Pink proposes that six characteristics of right-brain thinking are key to success in the new economy. Nils Davis realizes that these characteristics are embodied by good product managers today. We will define the conceptual age, review the six characteristics, and see how this applies to product management.
Interaction Design and Structured Requirements
subtitle: Wiegers and Cooper assimilated
Wiegers promotes structured requirements. Cooper touts Interaction Design. Both have great ideas. Both “wave their hands” at parts of the process. In this post, we’ll talk about how to combine the two philosophies to get the best of both worlds.
Interaction design explained by Alan Cooper
There’s a Clash of the Titans joint-interview posted at FTPOnline between Kent Beck and Alan Cooper called Extreme Programming vs. Interaction Design. It’s 10 pages of back and forth. In short, these icons agree on objectives, and disagree on how to achieve them. They also spend some time (mis)characterizing each other’s positions and defining their own. In this post we will look at how Alan Cooper explains Interaction Design. We would say that he defines interaction design more as a requirements than a design activity.
Prioritizing Software Requirements – Kano Take Two
In our previous post on Kano requirements classification, we introduced the concepts and showed how to apply them. One of our readers commented privately that we didn’t show how to use the techniques for prioritization. We’ll do that in this post.
Prioritizing Software Requirements With Kano Analysis
We’ve talked before about three ways to prioritize software requirements. We’ve also talked about incorporating risk analysis into ROI calculations for requirements. In this post we will look at how Kano analysis can be applied to prioritizing requirements.