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)

Leveraging automated verification code patterns

Just like with any other code, we can apply standard code patterns to our verification code in order to improve our code's structure or maintainability. As detailed in the previous sections of this chapter, we can minimize our verification code's brittleness by having our step definition code reflect an operational level of knowledge, rather than the nitty-gritty technical details. We will achieve that by using two tried and tested code patterns, the Page Object and the Façade. Let's look at the Page Object first.

Hiding browser details with the Page Object pattern

The Page Object pattern is a way to represent HTML pages and their elements in reusable classes. Page Objects provide an abstraction that allows us to write browser-interaction code that is reusable and maintainable. It works like this:

  1. We create a Page Object for each web page our operational workflow uses. The object has methods that represent...