Category: Requirements
Requirements and specifications: What's the difference and what's it to you?
September 16, 2008
There have been a number of threads I have followed in a few different forums recently where people have discussed requirements, what it means for requirements to be ‘good’, and what it might mean for requirements to be unambiguous. What usually follows is a long-winded back and forth, with no resolution. At the heart of […]
Answering a question…
July 15, 2008
A few weeks ago, Designer commented on Software testing, art and productivity. The question got lost in amongst the comment spam, so I thought I’d give my answer a bit more prominently than usual. The question was: …Many people who want to get a web-developed project don’t even understand the details of work. They just […]
INVESTing in User Stories, revisited
July 14, 2008
Mike Cohn’s “User Stories Applied” discusses using the INVEST mnemonic as a guide to writing better user stories. I was recently asked to dig up a reference for it, and found this presentation here, with the section on the mnemonic on pages 47 and 48. As I read it, I noticed that there’s been a […]
Planning to make use of learning – Incremental vs Iterative
January 25, 2008
During coffee with Agile-coach and all-round excellent guy Shane Clauson, in sympathy with yet another of my what’s-wrong-with-agile rants, he pointed me to this blog post from Jeff Patton: Don’t know what I want, but I know how to get it While my opinions diverge on some of what he says must be true, I […]
Making user stories work (by writing use cases instead)
January 17, 2008
I’ve had a few common rants on most of the agile projects I have worked on. Developers bogged down in the detail of stories, while the critical goals of the system wound up ignored, or realising at the last minute that all of the stories built would do nothing useful. The ideas I came to […]
The essence of goal-driven design
November 11, 2007
I work with James, and he emailed this quote around the office – “UNIX was not designed to stop you from doing stupid things, because that would also stop you from doing clever things.” (attributed to Doug Gwyn) I had forgotten about my response until I re-subscribed to his blog just now. “Unix needs an […]
The essence of testing on agile projects
October 24, 2007
‘Capturing the essence’, or ‘core’, has been a key theme in some of my work recently, and in several of the books I’ve been reading. So over a drink with Michael Ruschena tonight a couple of these came out as we linked ‘the core’, ‘agile’, and haiku – poetry that captures the essence. I’ve been […]
Project Manifestos
August 14, 2007
Having worked on the trial project mentioned in Michael Ruschena’s recent blog entry on Project Manifestos, I can say it’s well worth trying out. And when I say ‘trying out’, I mean having the conversations and going through the thought processes required to figure out how you might work together as a team. I find […]
Requirements analysis thought process walkthrough…
March 28, 2007
Michael has moved to a new city, and is obviously free of social distractions. That, or there’s something physically stopping him from playing World of Warcraft. Anyway, he’s blogging again and his latest entry (http://www.ruschena.org/michael/?p=107) on writing technical requirements is well worth a read.