Agile Requirements—From Breadth to Depth

Requirements elicitation and documentation can be frustrating in an agile process. Some interpret the Agile Manifesto statement “working software over comprehensive documentation” to mean that no requirements documentation is warranted because the code documents the requirements. Others are concerned that if details of requirements are not treated equal to code, they are lost for future program modifications. Ken Pugh does not find this an either-or situation and describes ways to create requirements that are a balance between these two extremes. He shows how to develop requirements from epics that describe requirements broadly to developable units (stories), which are releasable units (minimum business increments/minimum viable features). With a brief introduction to acceptance tests, Ken explains how they can be used to capture the details of requirements. He demonstrates lightweight use cases as both a story exploration technique and an organizing mechanism for scenarios. Ken also illustrates the dependencies between individual requirements using the story map technique. Leave with practical approaches for developing your agile requirements from breadth-first to depth-last.