I left off in my last post discussing how the good folks at Adobe have provided us with an amazing example of bloatware in the form of Acrobat. I decided to sit for a few minutes today and really look at Acrobat for the first time in a while. I’ve been dutifully installing their new [...]

A February article in the Harvard Business Review entitled Defeating Feature Fatigue (excerpted here) really struck a nerve with me. The dilemma that the authors call out in their paper is captured perfectly here: Adding features improves the initial attractiveness of a product but ultimately decreases customers’ satisfaction with it. So what should you do? [...]

I had been planning on one more post in my series on Karl Wiegers’ More About Software Requirements: Thorny Issues and Practical Advice, but an interesting post from Steve Johnson over at Pragmatic Marketing caught my eye. In Another Negative Development Rant Steve poses the following question: Must the product manager have to specify everything [...]

A couple of weeks ago I presented an overview of More About Software Requirements – Thorny Issues and Practical Advice by Karl Wiegers. Today, I am going to drill down a little bit further into one of the sections that I thought was particularly well done. Part V of the book is titled On Writing [...]

Karl Wiegers is one of the favorite authors around the Seilevel office with his Software Requirements, Second Edition considered one of the better books on the topic. Karl’s latest, More About Software Requirements – Thorny Issues and Practical Advice, arrived in January but unfortunately has managed to sit in my briefcase ever since awaiting a [...]

There was another fantastic post a few weeks back from Scott Selhorst over at Tyner Blain. This entry from his foundation series had Scott covering the topic of user experience disciplines. Software UI design is an area that has been near and dear to my heart ever since I majored in human factors engineering as [...]

I was out walking with my two-year-old son last week when we crossed the street next to a person on a motorcycle. From the running commentary in the stroller emerges “the man on the motorcycle is going to school.” Umm…..huh? “Hey bubba, how do you know the man is going to school?” “Because he is [...]

Since our IEEE/SPIN presentation has come and gone, I have been able to start getting caught up on my blog reading. I came across this post from Johanna Rothman that really serves as a great reminder that I personally realize I need on a regular basis. In it, she discusses how she recently had to [...]

Jeff Gray reports in his Collection of Ambiguous or Inconsistent/Incomplete Statements that “the 500 words used most in the English language each have an average of 23 different meanings.” I think there are few times in life when you better grasp this fact than when you are either writing software requirements or when you are [...]

On Wednesday evening, February 15th, Joe Shideler and I will be presenting at a special combined meeting of IEEE Computer Society, Austin Chapter and Austin Software Process Improvement Network (A-SPIN). The title of our presentation is Beyond The System Shall – A Journey From Good to Great Requirements. This is the event that was originally [...]