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)

Why is automated verification valuable?

There are two answers to this question. The first one should be easy to guess: because automated verification saves time and effort. We could verify our system's behavior by having someone sitting in front of a screen, running our system with one hand, while holding our specification with the other, and checking that everything works as we describe in our features. This approach will take a lot of that person's time and it runs the risk of that person getting tired or distracted and missing things or making mistakes. Alternatively, we could automatically run code that verifies our system consistently, reliably, and faster than a person can.

The second answer is much more appropriate. We have mentioned repeatedly throughout this book that features must reflect domain-level behavior, things that are important to an actor in the context of a particular feature's scenario. So, for instance, if our scenario for publishing a blog...