I’ve done a lot of data mapping lately. Seriously. In the past eight months or so, my work life has been taken over by a seemingly endless stream of data mapping between interfaces for a credit adjudication system. This was an overwhelming amount of work for me at first. As I grew more comfortable mapping […]
Tag: Requirements Best Practices
Deriving Requirements by Trial and Error
I recently transitioned into a business analyst role. Before that, I was considered a subject matter expert (SME) on the customer end of a software project. This sets the stage for discussing my experience as a SME, how becoming a business analyst expanded my understanding, and what I can take away from being in a […]
Unspoken Assumptions
Fundamentally, assumptions are facts that we tentatively decide to accept as true so we can continue to make progress, even though we know those assumptions might end up being wrong. Assume standard temperature and pressure, or assume a frictionless plane, or assume a spherical cow. Rather than measuring exact temperatures and pressures, or coefficients of […]
Using Revenue Properly to Measure Project Success
Objective measures are needed to determine the success and failure of commercial software development efforts. The feedback for companies that sell software as a product or as service is immediate and determined by the marketplace – they either have revenue or they do not. However, for software developed to use internally by companies, there is […]
Writing Requirements for Human Beings
On a painfully cold night in February, not long ago, I rounded up several friends and headed down to a slightly moldy church basement on R Street. The plan was to prepare a meal for a nearby women’s shelter. Our enthusiasm ran high; our skill and organization, perhaps not quite as high. Fortunately at least […]
Preview of the Outline for Visual Models for Software Requirements
Tony and I have a new book coming out in June: Visual Models for Software Requirements! Here is a sneak peek at what to expect. We start with an introduction to visualization in software requirements to explain what we mean by “models,” what the requirements modeling language (RML®) is, and why models are so important. […]
Visual Models for Software Requirements: Now Available on Amazon
Joy Beatty and Anthony Chen are co-authoring a book for Microsoft Press, and Visual Models for Software Requirements is now available for advance ordering on Amazon. This book will help business analysts, business analyst teams, and IT product managers apply best practices for capturing, analyzing, and implementing software requirements through visual models—and deliver better results […]
Business Analyst Tip: Overload Software Requirements Models with Care
In Learning to Use Visual Requirements Models: Adding Context by “Overloading” the Business Data Diagram, the author tells us how to overload a Business Data Diagram (BDD). One of the main goals with visual software requirements models is effective communication, so I tend to be “for” anything that furthers the cause. When I look at the author’s […]
Requirements Definition? You Know The Rest…
Is the craft of requirements definition inherently mechanical and not conducive to artistic or any higher form of expression? Are those of us who pursue this vocation doomed forever to be trapped in a world of serial aggregation and disaggregation? Is it a lifetime of purgatory surrounded by Use Cases, Process Flows, Business Data Diagrams […]
Bienvenue. Willkommen. Welcome. Beinvenida. Benvenuto. Boas-Vindas.
Upon entering an airport in a foreign country we all see signs welcoming visitors written in multiple languages similar to the title of this post. As one goes farther East, the Western scripts and languages give way to the character based languages like Chinese, Japanese, Hindi, Tamil and so on. Regardless, there are some kinds […]