Book Image

Managing Software Requirements the Agile Way

By : Fred Heath
Book Image

Managing Software Requirements the Agile Way

By: Fred Heath

Overview of this book

Difficulty in accurately capturing and managing requirements is the most common cause of software project failure. Learning how to analyze and model requirements and produce specifications that are connected to working code is the single most fundamental step that you can take toward project success. This book focuses on a delineated and structured methodology that will help you analyze requirements and write comprehensive, verifiable specifications. You'll start by learning about the different entities in the requirements domain and how to discover them based on customer input. You’ll then explore tried-and-tested methods such as impact mapping and behavior-driven development (BDD), along with new techniques such as D3 and feature-first development. This book takes you through the process of modeling customer requirements as impact maps and writing them as executable specifications. You’ll also understand how to organize and prioritize project tasks using Agile frameworks, such as Kanban and Scrum, and verify specifications against the delivered code. Finally, you'll see how to start implementing the requirements management methodology in a real-life scenario. By the end of this book, you'll be able to model and manage requirements to create executable specifications that will help you deliver successful software projects.
Table of Contents (12 chapters)

Modeling requirements with impact maps

In Chapter 1, The Requirements Domain, we learned how to identify stakeholders and goals. This is a crucial step in our analysis process, but in order to store and share our analytical findings, we must be able to represent these entities and their associations in a simple yet understandable manner. In other words, we want to model our requirement entities, and a great way of doing that is by using impact maps.

Introduction to impact mapping

Back in 2012, Gojko Adjiz defined the concept of impact maps, a technique that he evolved from UX-based effect-mapping methods in order to improve communication, collaboration, and interaction in teams and organizations.

Simply put, an impact map is a tree graph with four levels, where each level of the tree represents an answer to some fundamental questions about our system:

  • Why are we building the system?
  • Who benefits from it?
  • How can the stakeholders achieve their goals?
  • ...