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)

Analyzing requirements

In Chapter 1, The Requirements Domain, we talked about the concept of the requirements funnel. This is a mental model that illustrates how requirements keep coming at us from many directions and in many forms and shapes. We need to filter these requirements and convert them to quantifiable and knowable entities so that we can process them. These items are our requirement domain entities (goals, stakeholders, capabilities, and features). If you've done chemistry at school, you may have used a separating funnel. These funnels are used to separate mixed liquids, such as oil and water. To convert requirements to requirement domain entities, we must use a mental separating funnel, which will filter the mixture of incoming requirements and then identify and create the relevant domain entities. Once we've done that, we can model those entities as an impact map, that is, our requirements model.

Our funnel will consist of distinct filtering techniques. These...