Within a discussion on the Seilevel message board about the characteristics of a good requirement, Elaine and Gescober discussed whether a requirement must be feasible in order to be a good requirement. While initially it looked like they had opposite opinions–Elaine: No, Gescober: Yes– they’ve seem to have come to some meaningful points of agreement: [...]

I found myself last year working on a UI heavy project, in which we were specifying detailed requirements associated with individual UI elements.  One of the elements that the customer wanted to define were the field lengths for when users enter text.  This text might include street address, city name, zip codes, etc. Seems simple. [...]

Our company is currently doing an evaluation of our consultants and support staff using Strength Finder 2.0. I was skeptical at the beginning of this process, but I’ve been impressed by the results so far. We have a lot of different types of consultants within Seilevel, but we’re seeing a couple different themes: Strategic: These [...]

Interaction Elasticity by Jakob Nielsen contains some useful data for those of us writing usability requirements: Yes, we know that response times must be less than 1 second for navigation to feel seamless and less than 10 seconds to prevent a user’s attention from wandering. These time limits are caused by the human brain’s structure [...]

After I’ve solved the same problem half a dozen times, even I start to notice patterns. Pattern recognition is an important skill for people doing requirements. However, if you don’t have a way of acting on the pattern recognition, you aren’t helping yourself. I’ve begun to catalog the patterns that I see associated with software [...]