Requirements Articles
The Most Expensive Software Decision Happens Before You Write a Line of Code
A Story We’ve Lived More Than Once Early in our relationship with one client, we were building two products simultaneously while they had a third underway with another vendor. Same goals, same timeline, but each product came to us, or them, with a different level of definition. What unfolded was something we’ve seen many times […]
Cucumber Isn’t Human Readable
It’s frequently touted that Cucumber is “human readable” which at first glance seems to be the case. Examples show clean, easy to read language, that then gets a dozen or so lines of scripting to turn into a real test. Some guides will give warnings about some common code smells from poorly written tests, but […]
Why Your Software Feature List Will Change (And That’s a Good Thing)
Every software consultant has experienced this moment: A client arrives with a detailed feature list, meticulously crafted and approved through multiple layers of their organization. They’ve secured funding, aligned stakeholders, and are ready to build. There’s just one problem—that list is going to change. Significantly. I recently managed a project that perfectly illustrated this reality. […]
Storylines: A Tale of Two Products
So, you say you want to build a product? Awesome. How do you get started? In the Days of Yore Day 1 Some people used to (and sometimes, still do) get dozens of people in a room and author this 200 page document that has a bulleted list of statements of what the software should […]
Changing Plans – Blog Jam
There is some friction between agile methodologies and the desire for upfront formal requirements that has really been bugging me lately. I often find myself wanting to have my cake and eat it too: I want clear and final requirements, but I don’t want to be forced to design an entire system upfront and drown […]
Deconstructing “always” and “never”
How many times has a statement (requirement) like one of the following been given to you? (only to find out months later that there is an important exception that was not given to you): Field X will always be a positive integer! (except for the case where we decided long ago to populate it with […]