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)

Applying the Agile requirements management workflow

Throughout this book, we've learned about different techniques, processes, and methods for dealing with various stages of the analysis and development life cycle. We can now put them all together in an integrated workflow that will start by capturing raw requirements from the stakeholders and end by delivering working code that verifiably delivers what our stakeholders require.

Our workflow consists of four distinct phases:

  1. Elicitation and Analysis
  2. Discovery and Modeling
  3. Executable Specification
  4. Development and Verification

These phases will be repeated time and time again throughout our project's life cycle, for each set of requirements that comes to our attention and through each development cycle or iteration (sprint). They will also be applied concurrently, where some of our team members will be eliciting requirements from the stakeholders, while some other team members will be creating...