Happy SeiHolidays! Over the next two weeks, we will bring back some of the most heavily-commented-upon blog posts on Seilevel’s Requirements Defined blog. First up: “4 Tips to Not Destroy Your Project…“ Joy Beatty wrote, “A year ago, I was working on a project where we created a list of features in Excel to help [...]

I do a lot of what could be considered firefighting on my current project.  I’m often given tasks with very short deadlines.  Tasks that would normally require days to complete need to be performed in a matter of hours.  One of these tasks was to perform an “audit” of the requirements for the project (I [...]

One of the foundations of the Seilevel methodology is visualization.  The goal behind visualization is that they enable you to see patterns and find missing requirements immediately.  You might be surprised at the types of things that you can see when you visualize. A friend had a Facebook post about socialgraph (http://apps.facebook.com/socgraph/?ref=ts)  so I thought I [...]

It is the end of your project and your tests are passing. Are you ready to confidently release your project?  Or, are you secretly crossing your fingers like a young child, hoping that your tests were adequate to confirm the product is of sufficient quality to release? Why not leverage the work that you put [...]

He Who Gets Slapped – Leveraging the project requirements after analysis phase to avoid the tyranny of the urgent and help guide the project to a successful conclusion Someone who totally avoids acknowledging a problem is sometimes referred to as “burying their head in the sand like an ostrich.”  Even though ostriches don’t actually do [...]

It’s that time of year, where our thoughts turn to the holidays…the holiday parties, the shopping, the lights, visiting with family!  For many organizations, the end of the year tends to be quiet on the IT front, for no organization wants to risk introducing problems into their production environment at year end. So as I [...]

I have spent the last year and a half working on an enterprise software solution development effort where we do not use a Requirements Management tool like Caliber or Visual Studio TFS. Our requirements are created in Word using standardized templates and distributed to Development and Test teams for consumption. Test cases are written in [...]

Conclusion to the series, “How to Shoot Yourself in the Foot: 7 ways to do software requirements poorly to set your project up for failure and what to do instead.” Short-change Time Spent on Software Requirements or Don’t do Them at All Don’t Listen to Your Customer’s Needs Don’t use Models Use Weasel Words Don’t [...]

Number 7 in the series, “How to Shoot Yourself in the Foot: 7 ways to do software requirements poorly to set your project up for failure and what to do instead.” Short-change Time Spent on Software Requirements or Don’t do Them at All Don’t Listen to Your Customer’s Needs Don’t use Models Use Weasel Words [...]

From a colleague in the field- Call for Chapter Proposals Title: Software and Systems Traceability Proposal Submission Deadline: July 30th , 2010 A book edited by: Andrea Zisman, Jane Cleland-Huang and Olly Gotel to be published by Springer-Verlag Introduction: Traceability relations are typically created and maintained either through use of a requirements management tool, or [...]