Have you ever noticed that the skills you have as a product manager or as a business analyst can transfer to other aspects of your life? I find myself in that exact situation, and having the skills to elicit requirements is proving to be very useful! My mother recently experienced a life changing event, one [...]
Carnegie Mellon SQUARE tool now available. Has anyone demoed this? http://www.sei.cmu.edu/newsitems/squaretool_announce.cfm
For the purpose of this discussion, let me define data defects in a software development process as defects caused when improper data setup manifests itself as “application errors.” I ran into this situation recently when I was asked to define requirements to fix a couple of defects that had been logged in the system by [...]
I attended a talk by folks from BluePrint and LexisNexis at BAWorld on Tuesday. The first bit of the talk was just an intro to agile and why it is useful on the projects. The part that I found most interesting was from someone who owned business analysis on lawyers.com – she effectively gave a [...]
I was just wrapping up a project co-writing a 90 page requirements document for a client and I am so proud of my work! Unfortunately our statement of work with the client says that we would only document at most 45 pages estimated at 3 pages per requirement. With this data in hand we were [...]
Be wary the out of scope feature pile. Sure it is a quick and easy way to kill off an entire new project’s worth of work, but did you kill it the right way? Make sure that when moving requirements to an out of scope status that the reasons for the decision are recorded and [...]
Alright. You’ve just identified the features that your client doesn’t need going forward, the ones they can hold off on for now, and the ones that have to be implemented with the project. How did you come to that conclusion? Were all the different group’s champions in a room with you giving the thumbs up [...]
This week I’m at the International Working Conference on Requirements Engineering: Foundation for Software Quality (REFSQ’09) and the Conference on Advanced Information Systems (CAiSE’09) in Amsterdam. The first two days are at REFSQ where there are just over 30 experts in requirements engineering in attendance, primarily from academia and a combination of Europe, USA, and [...]
Hey everyone, I’m co-chairing the REET09 workshop again this year. It’s held in conjunction with IEEE’s Requirements Engineering 09 conference in Atlanta this year. I’d like to encourage all of you to submit papers or training activities related to educating people on requirements! If you don’t feel like you have enough to do a paper, [...]
I have got to be one of the biggest proponents of checklists, I literally live by checklists. I have a personal belief that people just cannot remember everything they need to do in a specific situation if it’s more than a few actions – whether it is going to the grocery store, kicking off a [...]
