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)

Knowing why Features are executable specifications

So far, we've created a Feature that captures our system's Author uploads profile picture behavior. Our Feature is the one and only source of truth for our development team. They can now take this Feature and write and deploy code that implements the behaviors specified in our Feature. But how do we know that the code that our developers will deliver actually makes the system behave as specified? Well, there's an easy way to find out: we write some step definitions for our Scenario steps. A step definition is simply some code that executes the behavior specified in a step. So, in our sample Feature, we have a Background that states the following:

Background: 
Given the user is logged in as an Author
And the Author goes to their Profile page
And the Author chooses to upload a picture
And the Author selects an image file from their computer

We then write some code, in our programming language of choice, which sets...