requirements
Discover to Deliver—Agile Product Planning and Analysis, Ellen Gottesdiener's and Mary Gorman's book, is for software teams that are good at creating software but struggle to create the right value. The authors show techniques to help you adapt to the specific delivery method you're using.
Steve Berczuk reviews Lean UX: Applying Lean Principles to Improve User Experience by Jeff Gothelf and Josh Seiden. Through its stories, templates, and guidelines on agile user-experience design, this book will help your team do a better job of building in the best user experience possible.
Occasional users are likely to go back to more traditional, offline methods if the online equivalent isn’t immediately intuitive. There is little benefit for taking time to learn the system—as they’ll only be using it occasionally. This could impact the business case for moving a process to the web.
Crowdsourcing in its various forms has become a powerful technique used to connect with the end users and community, to engage with them, and to leverage their wisdom. While each form is powerful in its own right, crowd wisdom is becoming an important and inevitable marketing tool.
Product owners are constantly beset with a continuous stream of requests for the urgent, the important, and the marginal. The assumption implicit in such requests is that there is room for more of the "but we need this" requests to be filled.
Studies and experience show that higher quality and better value solutions are achieved by projects that attain a thorough and unambiguous understanding of business and user requirements. Adrian Reed looks at how requirements can help avoid project failure and waste.
Bugs that peek out during a window of vulnerability can make us think we’ve been outsmarted. But in their sleuthing bag testers have a powerful tool that can surface such issues: state modeling. Bonnie Bailey describes how to ask the right questions and observe language to find state transitions.
Assumptions are a fact of life. Without making assumptions, it’s unlikely that many decisions would get made, and certainly fewer projects would ever get launched. However, sometimes assumptions come back to haunt us. Adrian Reed looks at how to handle assumptions when working on projects.
There are two ways to think about scope—a list of things to be done or a list of goals to accomplish. As long as scope is defined as a list of things, then your project process is not agile, even if your team is using the mechanisms of agile development within the code creation cycle.
The Chicago Board Options Exchange (CBOE) trading system recently was shut down for part of a day due to a software glitch. Some inside the CBOE are looking to recent configuration changes, requirements tracking, and testing as possible culprits.