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 learned how to apply good practices in order to produce high-quality Features. Features are at the heart of requirements management: they are our system's specifications, and they drive our whole development effort. This is why it is so important to be able to write non-brittle Features that are easy to read, fully describe our system's behavior, and are easy to verify. By now, you should be armed with the knowledge needed to write a Feature correctly, accurately, and legibly, and be able to futureproof it by knowing which principles to follow and which patterns to apply or to avoid.

So far, we have learned what a requirements model is, which entities constitute this model (goals, stakeholders, capabilities, and features), and how to create this model and correctly define and describe our entities. In the next chapter, we will take an in-depth look at how to analyze requirements in order to identify, define, and create our requirements model...