Agile and Waterfall. Agile is the topic of many blogs just like this. People will tell you horror stories about their experiences with Agile. People spend hours at a time researching and debating about which is the better development method. Some people say waterfall development is a thing of the past. There are so many variations […]
Tag: Software Development Life Cycle
The Most Important Part of A User Story
The last couple of years has seen a wholesale shift in development methodologies among the Fortune 1000 companies from Waterfall to Agile. It is not an exaggeration to say that the Agile revolution that has been brewing in small companies, startups and web companies for the last decade and a half has finally arrived in […]
“Just Enough Documentation” for Agile Projects
Companies that make the switch from Waterfall methodologies to Agile struggle with requirements documentation. How much documentation do we need? What kind? When should this documentation be created? Who is creating this documentation? Our experience shows that companies have swung the pendulum too far in terms of both the quantity and quality of documentation when […]
Agile Requirements Document
At ArgonDigital, on our Agile projects we have introduced a project artifact called the Agile Requirements Document or ARD that we create during the planning phase of a project. We have done this on several projects and have had good success with it. An ARD is conceptually similar in some ways to the classic Business […]
Agile is a Cultural Revolution
Agile is often spoken of a development methodology along the lines of “Agile is a development methodology; other common development methodologies are Waterfall, Iterative, etc.” This is akin to saying something like “Weightlifting is a means of keeping fit; other common techniques to stay fit are aerobics, swimming, running, walking, etc.” There is nothing inherently […]
Factors of Safety in Requirements Design and Estimation
When I first started at ArgonDigital, I heard a lot about how requirements are the “foundation” of software development and design. That sounds great and the analogy does hold well in some cases. However, coming from a structural engineering background in school, I’ve begun to ask why we don’t treat requirements estimation and design in […]
Using Predictive Personalization to Enhance Your Products
Data analytics may seem to be a step removed from software requirements, but it is intertwined with every aspect of the product management lifecycle. Using elicitation with a client to unearth their base needs is an exciting adventure. It is a wide open field, especially when you come prepared with suggestions for your client to build […]
Six Reasons Organizations Don’t Really Measure Project Success
If posed with this question, leaders of most organizations will put their own companies into the minority camp that actually measure project success. And in a vast majority of cases, they would be wrong. As I pointed out in a prior post on this topic, there are unfortunately as many ways of measuring success as […]
A Business Analyst’s Checklist for User Acceptance Testing
A while ago, Joy wrote a post about how to prep for a UAT (User Acceptance Testing). I would like to add to that, with my own experience, for what is needed in order to prep for a UAT. I had a client once who was building an internal software product, failed their UAT, […]
Joy Beatty in Information Management’s “DMRadio” and Better Software Conference West Requirements Workshop
Joy Beatty, VP of Research at ArgonDigital, participated in a panel discussion on software requirements on Information Management Magazine’s “DMRadio.” If you’d like to listen to the archived discussion, you can find it here: https://bit.ly/zCznao The hour-long interview and discussion was hosted by Eric Kavanagh, CEO at The Bloor Group, and Jim Ericson, editorial director […]
Incorporating the Software Test Team into the Software Requirements Creation Process – Part 3
This is the last post in a series on “why incorporate the test team into software requirements creation earlier” – for the first post, click here; for the second post, click here. In the first part of this series on the role Testers can and should play in the requirements creation process, I stated that […]
Incorporating the Software Test Team into the Software Requirements Creation Process – Part 2
This is the second post in a series on “why incorporate the test team into software requirements creation earlier” – for the first post, click here. The downsides to not integrating the Test organization into the requirements creation process are rework, schedule slippage, scope changes and budget overruns. Bringing the Test team into the picture much […]