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)

Chapter 4: Crafting Features Using Principles and Patterns

In the previous chapter, we learned how to write Features correctly. In this chapter, we will take it one step further. We will learn how to craft our Features. Creating something can be done by following an instruction set. Crafting something is different. It takes skill, deep knowledge of the materials and domain we're working with, and intuition derived from trial and error. In this chapter, we'll be crafting Features by applying principles and patterns in order to write high-quality, maintainable, and verifiable Features. In particular, we will cover the following:

  • Behavior-Driven Development (BDD) principles
  • Discerning patterns in our Features
  • Patterns to avoid

After reading this chapter, you will be confident that you can write solid, future-proof Features by using the right mental models and discerning which patterns to apply and which to avoid.