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)

Identifying capabilities and features

In Chapter 1, The Requirements Domain, we identified two of the main entities in the requirements domain: stakeholders and goals. In the previous section about impact mapping, we saw how these entities slot perfectly into an impact map. It's time now to look at the other two main entities that constitute the requirements domain and how they are all represented within an impact map.

In the Introduction to impact mapping section earlier in this chapter, we saw how the third and fourth levels of an impact map correspond to the business and system impacts of a stakeholder's effort to accomplish their goal, respectively. We shall define the business impact as a capability. A capability is a stakeholder's required ability to do something with our system in order to reach their goal. We shall define the system impact as a feature. A feature is a system functionality or behavior required in order to support a capability. Let's now...