October 23, 2006 – 6:49 am
Arrived late last night and with a solid 4 hours of sleep head into the first day at The Ajax Experience. My presentation is this afternoon at 5:15 when I’ll be sufficiently worn out.
Just finished the keynote with Ben Galbraith and Dion Almaer. In summary they gave a rousing tribute to the reasoning behind having [...]
October 8, 2006 – 2:58 pm
Contour requirements management tool is now integrated with Open QA’s Selenium core!
We were having trouble testing our own application as it uses Ajax extensively and our test tools were causing us grief. We switched to Selenium and it’s worked great for us – after a bit of learning. In fact we liked it so much [...]
When we started work on Contour - our requirements management tool, we did a search for open source acceptance test tools. While it appeared there were many to choose from – when we looked a little deeper we found many were undocumented, never completed or required to much technical knowledge to be used.
The list quickly [...]
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. [...]
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 [...]
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.
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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
In the early stages of product development a major decision for us was what technology to use. There are many considerations such as distribution, how the product will be used and by whom. In my opinion it tends to come down to two things. Desktop vs web based. Obviously Desktop has many advantages when it [...]