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 defined and distilled two more requirement domain entities: capabilities and features. We learned how to use them alongside goals and stakeholders in order to model our requirements in a requirements model, using impact mapping. Knowing what these four entities are about and how they are related is the first step in the requirements management workflow that we'll be detailing in this book. We already started exploring the mental process we'll be using to analyze requirements and break them down into these four entities. We'll be delving in greater detail into how this mental process works in Chapter 5, Discovering and Analyzing Requirements, in the Discovering Requirements section, where we will also be applying effective techniques to help us discover and analyze requirements.

This chapter also introduced BDD. BDD is what we do after we have discovered and analyzed our requirements. Specifically, BDD will help us refine our requirements...