When working with large, distributed teams, requirements can often get lost in translation (sometimes literally). There is no way to prevent this completely, but there is a technique you can use to help reduce your risk in this area – perspective. If the development team was directly plugged in to the product manager’s brain, you [...]

We are on a large project for a client (>100 developers) and one of the issues that keeps coming up is how can we reduce the cycle time. At one point in the project we were using a waterfall model, all the requirements had to be done and approved before the requirements could be handed [...]

Why even bother? When’s the last time you asked yourself that? Was it something trivial — “Oh, I forgot to get canned lentils on aisle 6, but I’ll be back in the store tomorrow, so why bother to go back and get them now?” Or was it something more meaningful, like, “Nobody ever reviews my [...]

*Special Guest Contributor* Featured Article Data, Data Everywhere As a requirements guppy, I focused on the user experience when developing requirements – when were messages displayed, what options were available, what were all of the things they could do? I was a hard-core use case junkie. Use cases seemed so simple to conceive and so [...]

Have you ever asked someone a question, only to have him/her respond with, “Well, it depends…”? It can be extremely frustrating, especially when all you want is a simple, direct answer. For example, if I’m looking for directions to a restaurant and someone tells me that it depends on whether I want to take the [...]

Found this oldie but goodie in a file named – Requirements Management Task List. While not exactly what I would put together today, it still holds a lot of value for what it asserts (and doesn’t). Enjoy. Requirements Management Task List 1. Agree on a common vocabulary for the project. 2. Develop a vision of [...]

The Project Glossary defines terms/acronyms relevant to the project. You all probably know that. What may be news to some of you is that it singlehandedly provides a valuable and telling insight into the overall health of your project. Here’s how. Our project roles are primarily about communicating and ensuring common understanding of what is [...]

We had an email discussion in the office the other day about the term “Requirements Engineering” and I began thinking about most of the research I have read on the subject over the past 6-8 months. The vast majority of RE research is not being used by anyone in the ‘real world’ today. But why? [...]

I’ve been around software development for quite a while and have trained others in many different activities. Here is one of the most important questions I’ve learned to ask myself when telling someone how to do something: Am I telling them “my way” or “the way”? Sometimes what I am telling someone is simply “my [...]

One recent Saturday morning I got sucked into watching neat things on TED. If you haven’t seen it, go look now! I found one that was very relevant to product management called When it comes to tech, Simplicity Sells. Oh, and it’s realy fun to watch or listen to! It’s about how simple technology really [...]