Better Software East 2016 - Business Analyst - 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...

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...

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...

Whether you’re a developer, tester, ScrumMaster, CTO, or CEO, you know you have to listen to the needs of your customers and team; accept the fact that they are going to change their minds; and respond, adapt, tap dance, iterate, raise your voice, stand up, and delight your audience in order to ship out the best software of your entire life. Can I get a witness?! Jonathan Silva shares evangelizing strategies that can help you inspire at any level—whether a Fortune 500 company or a startup software company. These approaches include developing your point of view,...

Imagine you’re on an agile development team—and something feels weird. People disagree constantly, and when they finally do agree, no one commits to deliver the solution. Vocal team members dominate the conversation. You don’t trust your teammates. They don’t trust you. This isn’t a team. It’s just a group of people. Does this sound familiar? Because people are people—not interchangeable robots—building high-performing, self-organizing teams takes specific skills and a lot of work. In his experience working with agile teams, Robb Pieper has often taken on the...

In chasing velocity, we often ignore or don’t understand the uncertainties and associated risks in our processes and their results. Agile is designed to handle uncertainty in requirements as new features are requested and priorities shift. But shouldn’t we also be thinking about and mitigating the uncertainties that are unique or even introduced by using agile? Phil Lew suggests that our problem is that we sometimes carry assumptions which either cause us to spend too much effort on things we can’t control or give us unfounded comfort and reassurance. If we can’t...

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...

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...

Agile practices continue to improve as organizations move forward with adoption and adaption. However, as they move forward, they often run into daunting challenges—coordinating projects with highly complex requirements and interdependencies; navigating highly political environments; and finding ways to fund, report, and integrate agile project work into existing organizational processes. Jamie Mades has found that the Lean Agile Portfolio bridges these gaps, applying lean product development flow principles to identify high-value initiatives and speed completion...

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,...