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 2: Impact Mapping and Behavior-Driven Development

As well as the initial capturing of requirements, as system builders, we also need to deal with changes in requirements. A project's requirements constantly evolve, and we need to react to each stage of their evolution in two steps. The first is to correctly understand what is changing in the requirements. The second is to act on that new information in a way that helps reflect these changes and that influences the design and implementation of our system. To achieve this, we need to have a model that is a meaningful representation of our requirements.

In the previous chapter, we began to explore some of the entities within the requirements domain, namely goals and stakeholders. In this chapter, we'll expand our domain knowledge to capabilities and features and learn how to represent these four domain entities in an impact map. An impact map containing all the goals, stakeholders, capabilities, and features for our...