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)

Patterns to avoid

Anti-patterns are patterns that are known to produce adverse effects, such as making features too large, difficult to understand, or hard to verify. These patterns are to be spotted early and avoided. This section presents some of the most common anti-patterns found in the wild.

Anti-pattern – thinking like developers

Let's look at a Scenario written for our system's Search for Books feature:

Given I am a Book Reviewer
When I go to 'http://example.com/search'
And I click on the Search button
And I see a search text box with the id #search_books
And I enter "adams + galaxy"
Then I'm redirected to the results page
And I see the 'The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy' by Douglas Adams

Here, we can easily tell that this scenario was written by a software developer or some other technical person, simply by looking at the amount of technical details described. Step 2 has a URL in it. Step 3 specifies an...