Better Software East 2016 - Business Analysis & Requirements
Monday, November 14
Great Product Design with User Story Mapping
Built from index cards or sticky notes, a story map is a simple model, that helps the people who make it envision a customer’s experience with their product. Story maps are a core practice within a design process focused on understanding and building empathy with customers and users and then identifying and testing solutions to improve the customer’s experience with your product or services. Jeff Patton says that design process and story mapping can help you identify completely new product opportunities or improve the existing product experience. Learn how to map...
Acceptance Test-Driven Development
Defining, understanding, and agreeing on the scope of work to be done is often an area of discomfort for product managers, developers, and quality assurance experts alike. The origin of many items living in our defect tracking systems can be traced to the difficulty of performing these initial activities. Ken Pugh introduces acceptance test-driven development (ATDD), explains why it works, and outlines the different roles team members play in the process. ATDD improves communication among customers, developers, and testers. ATDD has proven to dramatically increase...
Tuesday, November 15
Writing Agile User Story and Acceptance Test Requirements
Poor requirements are often the major cause of project problems. Yet nobody does much about them—at least not effectively. Traditional approaches advocate writing voluminous requirements documents that often don’t help much and may even contribute to difficulties. Agile goes to the opposite extreme, relying on brief requirements in the form of three-line user stories that fit on the front of an index card and a few user story acceptance criteria that fit on the card’s back. In this exercise-focused interactive workshop, Robin Goldsmith reveals reasons user stories...
Wednesday, November 16
In Their Shoes: Understanding Your Mobile Users’ Point of View
A team’s ability to manage change and match shifting business goals is a major component of successful mobile agile development. To help an organization rise above its competition, especially in today’s digital economy, teams must get apps to market fast—and also delight users. User experiences—and the feedback provided to the world via social media and the app store—pave the way toward a brand’s success or failure. So it’s critical that organizations understand the all-important mobile user point-of-view (POV). Steve Moses describes how to leverage the right mix...
A New Approach to Software Safety, Risk, and Vulnerability Analysis
Software has found its way into almost every part of our lives. Increased automation in the cars we drive can lead to failures which could result in physical injury, unacceptable risk, or cyber security vulnerabilities. In order to prevent accidents, identification of hazards, risks, and security vulnerabilities is required during development. The problem is the traditional hazard analysis techniques—failure effects and modes analysis, fault tree analysis, and root cause analysis—were developed for simplistic hardware controllers and are based on single point...
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...
Avoid Critical Mobile UX Mistakes
With SaaS-based business models, where users pay by the month and can switch applications in a heartbeat, great user experience (UX) becomes paramount. Mobile intensifies this as users can quickly and easily try another app. You’ve got about thirty seconds for your users to understand how to use your app and get value from it. So, how do you do that? Not with a beautiful UX or “wow factor” but with a UX that works for and speaks to the user, understanding what they want when they want it. Phil Lew outlines key principles for the design and evaluation of usability...
Thursday, November 17
Experience Agile Emergence through Sketch Comedy
“The best architectures, requirements, and designs emerge from self-organizing teams.” Most people read this principle from the Agile Manifesto and focus on the self-organization element. What about the concept of emergence? Exactly how do requirements and designs emerge? And how do self-organizing teams enable emergence? Get a hands-on lesson on emergence and self-organization using an unlikely source of inspiration: sketch comedy. John Krewson leads courageous delegates to envision, write, rehearse, and perform an episode of The Waterfall Comedy Hour....
Them’s the Rules: Using a Rules Engine to Wrangle Complexity
When dealing with complicated and ever-growing program conditions brought on by new business requirements, it's easy for what was once a small conditional block of code to grow to evaluating hundreds of unique conditions. Unfortunately, much like kudzu, that bad practice begins to creep into other areas of code. Micah Breedlove says that incorporating a rules engine to handle the conditional logic is a great way to reduce the code smells wafting from a multi-hundred line conditional. Converting the conditional into one small block of code which can retrieve and...
The Agile Product Owner: Beyond the Books and Classrooms
As organizations embark on agile transformation, many traditional project managers or business and technical leads are thrown into the Product Owner role after reading a book or two and, perhaps a few days of CSPO training. In the midst of changing environments, conflicting mindsets, and other change-related issues, they are expected to start operating within a Scrum team. Alicia Cyrus compares the responsibilities of product ownership and traditional project management—similar roles, same goal of achieving working software (or services) and productive teams, but...
Requirements Are Simply Requirements—or Maybe Not
Many people talk about requirements. They use identical terms and think they have a common understanding. Yet, one says user stories are requirements; another claims user stories must be combined with requirements; and yet another has a different approach. These “experts” seem unaware of the critical inconsistencies of their positions. No wonder getting requirements right remains a major challenge for many projects. Robin Goldsmith analyzes often conflicting, not-so-shared-as-presumed interpretations of what requirements are, reveals likely implications, and...
Identify Business Value before Business Requirements
According to the 2015 Standish report, a mere 29 percent of software development projects are successful. Is it because developers are choosing the wrong tools and processes? Is it due to a lack of communication between business leaders and developer teams? Although these issues may contribute to the failure of a project, they do not accurately address why these projects fail time and again. Lisa Calkins says the main reason projects are unsuccessful is a lack of planning between the initial application idea and the rush to set feature requirements. Instead,...