The concept of self directed teams has been around for several decades in the modern corporate world. And much longer if you consider all of human society. Often times in today’s command and control world we forget that those who are doing the work are the best to determine how it should get done. I [...]

Taxi drivers in India are interesting. None of the taxis so far have meters, so the payment can be a negotiation. Sometimes they tell you it is 100 rupees. Sometimes it is 200 rupees (the return trip to the hotel is always more expensive!). But then you get some drivers who say “Pay me whatever [...]

Martin Glinz, from the University of Zurich, presented a paper titled On Non Functional Requirements. I will first summarize Martin’s points, before sharing my thought on it all. First he stated something we all agree – there is no consensus on how to classify non-functional requirements (NFR). Sometimes we hear that what a system does [...]

This is a follow up from the previous post on the Meet the Experts panel. The thing I loved about this panel is that 2/3 of the time was devoted to audience questions. Each question was to be addressed at a specific panelist, and then others on the panel could add comments. There were some [...]

On Wednesday at RE07, I was part of a panel of requirements experts from industry. The other panel members were: Brian Berenbach (chair), a manager for Siemens’ RE focus program as part of the corporate research organization there. Kousik Sankar, a senior software architect in the Philips Bangalore CE Technology office. Ian Alexander, an independent [...]

I was only able to attend a couple hours of the REV workshop. I listened to about three talks on various types of visualizations. The papers were primarily focused on visualizations for product lines. There were some interesting discussions around modeling decisions visually. The talks were: David Sellier presented Visualising Product Line Requirement Selection Decision [...]

Or should I say “sort of live” because the internet access onsite at the conference is hit-or-miss. But I am physically here in New Delhi, in attendance and writing in my spare moments! Day 1 at the conference was rich with content and learning opportunities! I attended 2 workshops, one on Requirements Education Engineering Training [...]

Joy Beatty is attending RE 07 in New Dehli. This year Joy is not only an attendee but is presenting two papers and speaking on a panel. You can find out more here. As always, look for Joy’s summary of the conference every day this week.

I spent some time this month working on a requirements modeling application based on a connection to the Borland CaliberRM database using the Caliber SDK. This was a lot of fun, since I don’t usually get a chance to write a lot of code, and I wanted to share some of what I learned. I [...]

The first principal of agile software development is that the highest priority is to satisfy the customer through early and continuous delivery of valuable software. This is a significant departure from traditional waterfall methods in which delivery of working software happens not early, but very late in the process. In waterfall type methods, the focus [...]