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)

Using tags to label, organize, and filter our Features

Tags provide an extremely useful way to denote different contexts for our Features. They can be used to group Features together, indicate scope, filter Scenarios, and provide visual clues to our readers. Tags are just words prefixed by the @ symbol. Let's take a look at the following Feature (shortened for brevity):

@order
Feature: Buyer places order
@important
Scenario: Missing delivery address
  Given …
@wip @financial Scenario: Applying discount
  Given

We have applied the @order tag at the beginning of our Feature. This means that the tag applies to all the Scenarios within that Feature. If we ask a BDD tool, such as Cucumber, to run everything tagged with @order, it will execute both the Missing delivery address and Applying discount scenarios. We could apply the same tag to other Features and Scenarios too, if they were referring to order-related functionality.

We have applied...