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 discussed the importance of requirements elicitation and its current state in the agile world. We then learned how to create two important artifacts: the stakeholder model and the glossary. These artifacts give us the context and clarity of communication needed when communicating with stakeholders. Finally, we examined how to gather requirements from our stakeholders and analyze them in order to identify requirement entities. We learned a number of elicitation and analysis techniques, such as structured conversation, D3, and business process mapping. These techniques greatly facilitate the gathering and analysis requirements and allow their successful modeling in a requirements model.

This chapter also concludes the first part of the book. You now have enough knowledge to elicit, validate, model, and specify your system's requirements. However, requirements management doesn't stop here. In the next section of this book, we'll learn how...