Tag: Requirements

Back to the Future: Reverse Engineering Requirements

Many organizations today have systems that have no or very little documentation. Users and customers have relied on these legacy systems to provide a reliable means to work on vital…

Houston We Have a (requirements) Problem

  It's one thing to see the latest unemployment statistics on the nightly news but quite another to sit down for a coffee with your brother-in-law who just lost…

10 Signs that you are really Wagile

  Yes, Wagile. For years now I have been going around as a certified agile Scrum Master thinking I was being humorous by introducing the term "Wagile" to those customers…

Do You Promise to Tell the Truth, the Whole Truth, and Nothing but the Truth

I can see the court room setting - the Business Analyst is on trial because the Business Client isn't happy with the software they just received. At first the…

Big Freaken Requirements Documents Must Die!

The typical requirements document is a long, sprawling piece of literature. Within it, one might find a title page, table of contents, change history, complex headers and footers, legalese, confidentiality…

You want defects in your Requirements Definition & Management Solution?

To clarify, the question above does not refer to bugs in the actual code of your RDM solution. The answer to that is obvious. Instead, it asks whether as users…

What’ll it be - Chaos Management or Requirements Definition?

I met with a prospective customer last week. Our introductory presentation identified the requirements-related challenges they had been trying to solve. We mapped those challenges to the strengths and value…

Three is the Magic Number (in Requirements Development maturity)

Requirements Development (RD) and Requirements Management (RM) make up the Requirements Engineering (RE) discipline. RD consists of elicitation, analysis, specification, and validation tasks while RM consists of change control, version…

Requirements - What’s the big hurry if they are going to change or be wrong?

It always appears to be rush, rush, rush, never enough hours in the day to sit with the business folks, host a JAD session, document what they want, type it…

For unity’s sake, clean up those requirements documents!!!

It's easy enough to tell a story, but what happens when the consumer's comprehension of the story determines how it will turn out. Imagine a book that automatically…

How to Be Awesome At Being A BA

Chances are, if your career has landed you in the role of a business analyst, it was probably by accident. Even if it wasn't, I'm willing to make…

Avoiding Project Rework - Measure twice and cut once

  "Measure twice and cut once!" That was my father's mantra on the job site. He was a contractor, building houses, garages, assorted additions, porches, etc. It was his…

No Parking after 2’’ Snowfall

Much to the astonishment of my warm-weather relatives in Texas, Alabama, and California, I live in an area of the country that receives about 4 feet of snow each year. As…

Don’t fear the Use Case

Working with many organizations, I've discovered that there are always a few people who are afraid of use cases. This is mostly because they have never had training on…

Read any Good Requirements Documents Lately?

Personally, I love reading requirements documents. I put them on my night stand right next to my last car loan contract and all the paperwork from my last home closing.…

Tracing Requirements to Source Code

Over the last ten years, I’ve been on the technical end of sales for several requirements definition and management (RDM) vendors. Some of the products I’ve…

Agile, Use Cases, and You

From a development perspective, I find that use cases provide value because they allow the stakeholders to understand the behavior of the system prior to its being built. More importantly,…

The Foundation of Good Requirements: Business Rules and Business Requirements

Business rules and business requirements provide the foundation of a project as we embark upon requirements authoring and validation. A proper understanding of these two areas is essential to any…

Requirements are done…..And the Oscar goes to?

So the first question would have to be, what does “done” look like? At what part of the requirements process do we go for the all important approval…

New Webinar: Origin of the Big Thick Requirements Document

This past Wednesday (09-SEP-2010) Chip Carey, our AVP of solutions engineering, did two great things. First, he kicked off our weekly requirements webinar series. Second (and more importanly) he delivered…

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