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)

Business process mapping

A business process is a sequence of related, structured activities or tasks by people or equipment that, when applied successfully, serves a particular business goal. Business processes, visualized as graphs, can be an extremely helpful tool in our analysis toolbelt. Business process diagrams are usually written using UML or BPMN notation, but simple flowcharts are also common.

Tip

When starting to elicit requirements, ask your client stakeholders whether they have already captured the business processes that they want our system to realize. If not, ask them whether any of their domain experts can possibly produce such diagrams. As well as helping you elicit requirements, this will also make them consider and evaluate their requirements much more carefully.

Let's take a look at a diagram for an order approval business process flowchart (courtesy of https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Approvals.svg):

Fig. 5.7 – Business process for order approvals

Fig. 5.7 –...