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)

Discerning patterns in our features

Feature patterns are general, repeatable outlines or models of the way Feature is written or what it represents. Because patterns are repeated, we have learned to know the implications of applying (or not applying) specific patterns. Being able to discern patterns in our features means that we can anticipate potential problems and pre-empt them. It also means that we can choose to apply a pattern that is known to be beneficial, if conditions allow it. Let's examine the main feature patterns.

The CRUD Features pattern

CRUD stands for Create, Read, Update, Delete. It's a very common term in software engineering, used to denote generic read/write operations or behaviors. Let's imagine that we are developing a blogging system. We have outlined our impact map, as illustrated in the following figure:

Fig. 4.1 – A CRUD Feature

Fig. 4.1 – A CRUD Feature

Our main capability is CREATE AND PUBLISH BLOG POSTS. This clearly involves...