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)

Applying the BDD principles

The best way to ensure that we write good Features is to adhere to certain principles that will help us avoid mistakes and increase the quality of our Features. In this section, we will examine the four major mental models to help us write concise, descriptive, and well-scoped Features. Let's start at understanding that BDD is not about testing.

BDD isn't testing

BDD is about collaboration and shared understanding. By writing our features using a structured and ubiquitous language that can be understood by all stakeholders, we provide clarity and transparency. We allow and invite non-technical stakeholders to get involved in specifying our system's behavior. We make sure we all sing from the same hymn sheet, and that hymn sheet is our features, that is, our specifications. Yes, we also provide executable step definitions so that we can verify that our delivered code works as described in our features. But do not make the mistake of confusing...