Building Better Products Using Story Mapping – Part One

Published September 3rd, 2009 Under Project Management | Leave a Comment

Writing good user stories is one of the most misunderstood and challenging aspects of agile development. In this fast-paced hands on tutorial we’ll bust myths about user stories and leave you with a useful approach for writing and leveraging user stories. You’ll learn the essentials of user-centric story writing, and how to organize your stories into a map that makes sense of your entire backlog. You’ll learn tricks for planning usable and valuable incremental releases, and steering them to successful delivery.

Lean Software Development Achieving Better Requirements

Published September 1st, 2009 Under Agile, Lean | Leave a Comment

Agile approaches help by acknowledging the uncertainty and noise that surrounds software development projects. Their solution to this is evolutionary or emergent development. The question now is how can we improve on this? How to make the requirements process more objective and rigorous? The presentation suggests that a lack of rigorous requirements data can lead to sub optimisation and solutions that lack end customer focus. The next wave is to understand why customers interact with the organisation and then put those interactions under statistical process control. The evidence available for the strength of this approach is substantial.

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Lean Requirements

Published August 31st, 2009 Under Agile, Lean | Leave a Comment

Agile development practices introduced, adopted and extended the User Story as the primary currency for expressing application requirements within the agile enterprise. However, as powerful as this innovative concept is, by itself the user story does not provide an adequate construct for reasoning about investment, system-level requirements and acceptance testing across the enterprises project team, program and portfolio organizational and system hierarchy. Building enterprise-class software systems in an agile manner requires a richer model for discussing requirements-related concepts including not only user stories, but Investment Themes, Epics, Features and Nonfunctional Requirements as well as the various types of acceptance testing that helps assure system quality. In this tutorial, Dean Leffingwell describes a Lean and Scalable Agile Enterprise Requirements Information Model that scales to the full needs of the enterprise, while also providing a quintessentially agile subset for the agile project teams that do most of the work. This model has been developed and applied effectively in a number of very large scale agile enterprises, some supporting thousands of practitioners

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Efficient Ways to Work with Requirements

Published August 27th, 2009 Under Project Management, Software Testing | Leave a Comment

This talk is about the cooperation between test organisations and the people working with requirements. How do we work as efficiently as possible? When during the project lifecycle can we gain from each other? How do we best gain from each other? When do we think alike and what are the crucial differencies in the way we work and think? What is a testable requirement? How to work during changes in the requirements? How to inprove our relationship in order to create the best product ever?

From User Requirements to Product Value

Published February 2nd, 2009 Under Agile | Leave a Comment

Five Guidelines for Writing Need Statements. User Requirements usually are just raw data that describes a symptom or a limited solution. As an agile practitioner, I want to present “translation” guidelines for user requirements so that they can give more value to a final product.

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Slides of the presentation

Beyond Test Driven Development: Behaviour Driven Development

Published March 3rd, 2008 Under Software Testing, TDD | Leave a Comment

Test Driven Development (TDD) has become quite well known. Many developers are getting benefit from the practice. But it is possible that we can get even more value. A new practice is getting attention these days: Behaviour Driven Development (BDD). BDD removes all vestiges of testing and instead focuses on specifying the behaviour desired in the system being built. This talk will be focus on Ruby and will introduce a new BDD framework: rSpec. The ideas, however, are language independent.

Related material:

Improving Application Quality Using Test-Driven Development (TDD)

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