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)

Preparing for requirements analysis

Before we start eliciting and modeling requirements, it is very important that we do the following:

  • Understand who uses and/or influences our system, that is, the stakeholders. It is absolutely crucial that we know who will be interacting with our system before we try to understand what they want to achieve by using our system.
  • Ensure that we use a common language with our stakeholders. The usage of different semantics and ambiguous terms can be catastrophic when eliciting requirements. I once got through the best part of a 1-hour meeting before realizing that three of us in the room were using the term session in totally different ways: my colleague – a network engineer – meant a TCP session, I was talking about an HTTP (browser) session, while our client – a stockbroker – was referring to a trading session! Ridiculous as it may sound, such mix-ups and ambiguities are all too common when people from different...