I was recently writing a paper where I wanted to reference literature that explained how requirements are one of the key failure points in software projects. I was thinking this would be easy – I’d just reference the CHAOS report or some other academic studies. And intuitively (and experientially), it makes sense to say that [...]

Well the 2007 holiday season is officially underway! And with it, I find myself preparing for the usual hectic shopping experiences that I face every December. Though today I stopped to think – is it really so stressful for everyone out there? Is it just me? Perhaps that’s it. After all, I know people that [...]

Remember the old adage “You never get a second chance to make a first impression?” I’d like to share my thoughts on that conventional wisdom. I both totally agree with it and think it’s crazy. Maybe that makes ME crazy. I’ll let you decide for yourself on that one. In my line of work, making [...]

One of the quickest ways to improve your requirements documentation is to have someone else review your work and provide feedback. Of course, the flip side of asking someone to review your work is offering to review their work in return. And, entire project teams can dramatically raise the quality of their output if every [...]

We’re all trying to write easily understood documents. Using active voice helps us achieve this. Jakob Nielsen did a great job of explaining the benefits of using active voice in the first paragraphs of his article Passive Voice Is Redeemed For Web Headings. I recommend giving it a quick read.

If the word audit invokes fears of a dark room in front of an IRS auditor, then you’re in luck – that’s not what I’m going to discuss in this post. Instead I’m going to cover requirements audits and why you should do them. In fact, I’ll cover three major benefits of doing requirements audits. [...]

There’s a sense of security in knowing what’s mine and what’s yours. Not so much a sense of ownership (keep your hands off my stuff!), but a sense of responsibility. I know that I’m responsible for mowing my own yard, but not responsible for mowing yours. You know that you’re responsible for paying your electric [...]

To put it bluntly, requirements text is typically pretty bland to read. You don’t get the colorful variety of writing in passive voice, because it can confuse the audience. But also, you have to pick your words very carefully. English is actually quite challenging, in that words have different meanings. There is a concept called [...]

Any sizeable collection of use cases will have relationships between use cases that can be modeled using the UML includes and extends stereotypes. Used properly these model constructs help make the model more readable and maintainable. Used improperly they can make the model incomprehensible and this happens all too often. The includes relationship occurs when [...]