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 8: Creating Automated Verification Code

In the preceding chapters, we learned how to create executable specifications, that is, features that can be automatically executed and verified. As stated previously, this book is not intended to make you an expert on writing automated verification. Much of such expertise relies on coding, and specific library and technology-related skills, so it falls outside this book's remit. Having said that, it would be remiss if a book on executable specifications and end-to-end delivery methodology did not give any advice on how to go about writing good automated verification code. In this chapter, we will learn how to architect and design our verification code by looking at the following:

  • Why is automated verification valuable?
  • Avoiding brittleness by layering automation code
  • Leveraging automated verification code patterns

By the end of this chapter, you will know the basic principles behind writing solid, re-usable...