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)

Decompose, Derive, Discover (D3)

Another technique for analyzing and discovering requirements is what I call D3 for short. D3 is about parsing the communications we receive so that we can capture the appropriate requirements domain entities and create our impact map.

When should you use D3? When we have asynchronous communication with the stakeholders (for example, email) or when we have written requirements (formal documents, business rules, examples, narratives, and so on). We can also apply D3 to visual requirements, such as screenshots or storyboards. We just have to create a written narrative based on those visualizations.

Decomposition

Decomposition is simply the process of breaking down a piece of text into its constituent parts. Decomposing a textual requirement helps us identify the requirements domain entities it is referring to. Before we learn how to decompose requirement text into its constituent domain entities, let's take a quick trip down memory lane and...