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)

Revisiting the requirements management life cycle

In Chapter 1, The Requirements Domain, we talked about the requirements management life cycle, where I claimed that this book would provide methods and techniques that will help you implement every stage of it. It is now time to back this claim up and discuss how what you've learned in this book can be applied to each and every stage of the requirements life cycle. We shall illustrate this with an example project regarding a knowledge-sharing website. The initial requirements for this system are summarized as follows:

  • Knowledge producers (authors, in this case) can share their knowledge as blog posts, recorded videos, or live sessions.
  • Shared content will either be free or premium. Premium content can be purchased for a fee.
  • Authors decide which content is free and which is premium, as well as the fee for premium content.
  • A percentage of the fees that have been paid for premium content go to the website owners...