Monthly Archives: June 2006

What’s in a release?

June 24, 2006 – 10:00 am

There is a bit of irony in building a tool without a tool. It’s like building a table for a workbench so you can then build a table. So far we have been very efficient in our process of building our Requirements Management tool. We have a small team, with white boards and a wiki. [...]

By Derwyn | Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged , | Comments (0)

How much time to spend on requirements…

June 20, 2006 – 10:15 pm

Project teams often struggle with how much time to spend on requirements. I was reading the book “Just Enough Requirements Management” by Alan Davis and liked what he had to say.
“Documenting requirements is a lot like purchasing insurance. If you do not buy enough, you can end up with disastrous consequences. If you buy too [...]

By Eric | Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged , | Comments (1)

Codecamp 2.0

June 20, 2006 – 9:59 pm

If you are in the Portland / Vancouver area check out Code Camp 2.0 It looks to be an interesting weekend - if you like to code.

By Eric | Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged | Comments (0)

The Ying Yang of Process

June 14, 2006 – 5:23 pm

This article states that “developer misunderstandings of user requirements are the leading cause of defects in software.”  I do believe the developer should be better connected to the actual requirement. However even when using different methodologies, like Agile, there can be a disconnect. Documentation, conversations, phone calls, meetings after meetings all take place before the [...]

By Derwyn | Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged , | Comments (0)

What is an Analyst?

June 13, 2006 – 6:24 pm

What exactly does an analyst do?  This role varies from project team to project team – but the essence is the same – understanding and documenting an approach to a problem then figuring out how to communicate it back to the stakeholders and the project team.
Karl Wiegers has a nice summary of the Analyst position [...]

By Eric | Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged , | Comments (0)

Business Rules & Requirements

June 13, 2006 – 5:28 pm

I’ve been asked why we separated business rules from requirements in Contour.  When we designed the application we decided to keep rules separated so they could be reused and linked to multiple requirements.  I decided to do a little research to see if that makes sense.
Ellen Gottesdiener of ebg consulting has written a number of articles on [...]

By Eric | Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged | Comments (0)

Naming Woes

June 7, 2006 – 11:30 pm

I don’t remember having a hard time with naming things until recently.  We needed to name this new venture and assumed something clever would just come to us.  Fast forward a few months and we still didn’t have a name, so we decided to get serious.
We scheduled naming brainstorm sessions, started a wiki, read the [...]

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