Better Software West 2017 - Business Analysis & Requirements
Thursday, June 8
RAMP: Requirements Authors Mentoring Program
PreviewIndustry data indicates that untrained and inexperienced requirements authors commonly inject thirty to fifty major defects per page of text. With many requirements specifications reaching several hundred pages, potentially thousands of defects are injected into the software development process. John Terzakis says training and mentoring of authors by a requirements coach is effective in reducing defect densities by an order of magnitude—when each coach is assigned only a few authors, they are collocated and, most importantly, experienced requirements coaches are available. So what...
Improv(e) Your Requirements
Improvisational comedy—sometimes called improv—is a form of theater in which the performance is created spontaneously, in the moment. Successful improvisers learn and use a variety of skills and techniques which allow them to better extract ideas, expand on them, and make them meaningful and manifest. Now, reread the previous sentence but replace the word “improvisers” with “analysts.” In many ways, improv is a great analogy for requirement elicitation, analysis, and specification. In this highly interactive session, Damian Synadinos uses his extensive experience with improv and...
Impact Maps: Let Your Goals Drive Your Product Features
Wouldn’t it be great if there were a way to combine quantified business goals, direct traceability from goals to features, surfacing of value assumptions, cause-and-effect analysis, design thinking, and visual facilitation in a single approach? Mathias Eifert says there is! Impact maps support multiple stakeholders in gaining consensus on which features or actions are most useful in helping an organization achieve its goals. In the process, stakeholders agree what needs to be accomplished, create shared understanding of possible solutions, decide which user groups or personas to target...