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)

The lost art of requirements elicitation

Agile methods have, rightly so, become the standard way of creating and delivering software systems. Most agile frameworks and methodologies do not prescribe any way of capturing requirements and translating them into specifications. To fill this gap, most analysts and developers resort to using user stories as the starting point for the analysis and development process. As alluded to in previous chapters, user stories are usually too wide in scope and context to serve a useful purpose without a huge amount of context-filtering and descoping. This leads to what is known as user-story hell, where our product backlog consists of dozens of different stories, describing everything from non-acting stakeholders' wishes to technical constraints. Such backlogs are extremely difficult to manage or prioritize.

So, when a stakeholder tells us they want something from our system, we have two options.

The first option is that we create a user...