Is your product successful because you were lucky, or because you were methodical and intentional? Do you want to build a plan where you are dependent on good fortune, or do you want to make your own “luck?” Both approaches work, but only one makes sense as an intention. Slide […]
Process Improvement / Requirements / Software development
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Skip The Requirements, Empower The Developers
Enough of the debates about requirements and what we call them. Why don’t we just hire great developers and empower them to work directly with the customers?
Product Management / Requirements / Requirements Models / Use Cases
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The Use Case For Creating Goal-Driven Use Cases
There are 8 reasons we write use cases. Most of the benefits of documenting use cases come from communication, but all of the benefits depend upon the initial creation of the use case. The first step to determining the best way to create the use case is to understand the use case of creating use cases.
Process Improvement / Product Management / Requirements / Requirements management software / ROI / Software development
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Companies Will Waste $1B This Year on Software Tools
Gartner reported that companies spent $3.7 Billion USD on application development tools in 2004, with a 5% annual growth rate. The Standish Group has shown that 40% to 60% of project failures are due to requirements failures. At least 1/3 of the money spent on getting more efficient at coding is being wasted – it should be spent on writing the right software.
Communication / Consulting / Product Management
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Guerilla Product Management
*(scroll to the bottom and come back) Guerilla Product Management (pdf) is an article available from Sequent Learning Networks, written by Steven Haines. (Hat tip to brainmates for finding it) Steven’s pdf includes 17 golden rules for achieving product management success(no, we won’t do 17 articles on each of them). […]
Process Improvement / Requirements / Software development / Testing
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Non-Functional Requirements Equal Rights Amendment
We know how to deal with functional requirements. We know they are important – we can walk the dependency chain from goals to use cases to functional requirements. But how do we get to the non-functional requirements? Leathej1 points out the elephant in the room – non-functional requirements don’t get enough attention when it comes to testing. Let’s look into it some more…
Agile / Foundation series / Process Improvement / Software development / Test Automation / Testing
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Foundation Series: Functional Testing of Software
Functional Testing, also referred to as System Testing of software is the practice of testing the completed software to confirm that it meets the requirements defined for the software. A functional test is typically a test of user interactions, but can also involve communication with external systems. We contrast functional testing with unit testing. We also show how functional testing provides different benefits than unit testing.
CMMI / Process Improvement / Software development
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What CMMI level should we use?
The CMMI (Capability Maturity Model Integration) of a software development process is the measure of that process’s capability. The goal of the measurement is to provide an assessment of the capability of a process with respect to creating software. Our foundation series post on CMMI provides background information, while this post focuses on the danger of misusing CMMI ratings.
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).