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 5: Discovering and Analyzing Requirements

In the previous three chapters, we learned how to create goals, stakeholders, capabilities, and features, how to write these correctly, and how to use them to create a requirements model, represented as an impact map. Still, there is a very important part of the modeling process that we haven't touched upon in much detail: how to draw the requirements out of our stakeholders and extract well-defined requirement entities from these requirements. This is what we intend to examine in this chapter. Specifically, we will cover the following:

  • The lost art of requirements elicitation
  • Preparing for requirements analysis
  • Analyzing requirements
  • Having a structured conversation
  • Decompose, Derive, Discover (D3)
  • Business process mapping

By the end of the chapter, you will know why requirements elicitation is so important yet so casually handled in today's agile world. You will also have learned about...