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)

Summary

In this chapter, we learned how to use the output of our requirements analysis and modeling process, that is, our features, to drive an agile development cycle using Scrum or Kanban. This is where the methods detailed in the previous chapters of this book start to pay big dividends. By knowing how to write features that are descriptive, robust, accurate, and finely scoped, we have ensured what we can use these features as complete, autonomous work units that can be completed within a Sprint. By having a requirements model that ties features to capabilities to stakeholder goals, we can easily classify and prioritize our features so we can address what our stakeholder needs most urgently and what adds the most value to them. By having step definitions for our features, that is, true executable specifications, we have an automated, consistent, and accurate way to measure when a feature is done.

We also learned how to apply JIT development with a feature-first approach. This...