The Business Analyst role in most organizations I have worked with is passive and reactive by design. Analysts are given a feature description and tasked with defining the requirements for the same. The analyst then goes off to perform a set of activities and tasks like elicitation, model creation and requirements definition. Eventually, they create […]
Software Requirements Blog - Seilevel.com: Empower Business Analysts to Turn Them Into Product Managers
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From the Editor of Methods & Tools: Is Agile Dead or Can Good Software Development Scale?
As Agile becomes widely accepted as a software development approach, many large organizations have adopted it, mainly in its Scrum form to reduce development cycle. There might be even a fair share of adopters that are trying really to apply Agile values. If the topic of scaling Agile has been discussed for many years and you can read the excellent books of Graig Larman and Bas Vodde on this topic. We have also recently seen the emergence of proprietary” approaches, like SAFE, to achieve this goal. At the same time, ...
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Software Requirements Blog - Seilevel.com: Just Enough
One concept you’ll hear tossed about in an Agile discussion is that of “just enough.” You want just enough documentation, just enough development and testing, just enough time for meetings, just enough grooming, and so on. The idea is that doing more than is needed means you have throwaway work when you need to make […]
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Software Requirements Blog - Seilevel.com: Validation and Verification- An Engineer’s Perspective
I recently began teaching our training courses here at Seilevel and one of the topics we cover is validation and verification. In the training, we ask the students to brainstorm what validation and verification are and how they apply to software requirements. Surprisingly, to me at least, there are many people who think these are […]
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Software Requirements Blog - Seilevel.com: Unexciting Thresholds
Kano analysis, named for Professor Noriaki Kano, is helpful for figuring out what features will have the greatest sway on customer satisfaction. The approach uses five categories for considering satisfaction: Exciters (or Delighters), Performance, Threshold, Indifferent, and Reversed (or Questionable). These categories have been translated into English using various names, so you might see Kano […]
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Software Requirements Blog - Seilevel.com: Waterfall and Agile- An Engineer’s Perspective
Last time I talked about validation and verification and how they apply to both software requirements and engineering. Today, I’d like to cover another topic we talk about in our training and how it relates to engineering; software development lifecycles (SDLC) for Waterfall and Agile. Again, to begin, I’d like to start with the definition […]
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Software Requirements Blog - Seilevel.com: The Business Analyst and The Agile Team
The Agile Extension to the BABOK® Guide is well worth the read, and I’d encourage any business analyst heading into an Agile project to take the time to give it serious consideration. The section entitled “What makes a BA Successful on an Agile Team” starts off with this paragraph: The very nature of agile approaches […]
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Software Requirements Blog - Seilevel.com: Big data and analytics – Interesting tidbits for business analysts and product managers
I’m at Strata+Hadoop World today as a first timer as part of the data driven business day tutorial. I got to present in the middle of it on requirements analytics. But this whole day is awesome, like a crash course in big data and kinds of results it can get you. The schedule is here […]
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From the Editor of Methods & Tools: Quote of the Month October 2014
Minimalism also applies in software. The less code you write, the less you have to maintain. The less you maintain, the less you have to understand. The less you have to understand, the less chance of making a mistake. Less code leads to fewer bugs.
Source: “Quality Code: Software Testing Principles, Practices, and Patterns”, Stephen Vance, Addison-Wesley
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Software Requirements Blog - Seilevel.com: Intellectual Honesty
During a recent discussion in the office, the term “intellectual honesty” was bandied about. At Seilevel, intellectual honesty is part of our stated core values, but it’s a term that’s easily misunderstood and misused. Feeling that I needed to understand better what this term really means, I hit the search engines hard. I also, as I […]
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Software Requirements Blog - Seilevel.com: 2 minute models: A walk through the Business Objectives Model
Please join me for a quick walk through our Business Objectives Model. This video only scratches the surface of how valuable this model really is, and how it can be used for a variety of projects. Please feel free to make suggestions and ask questions in the comments section, and I will address them in […]
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From the Editor of Methods & Tools: Software Development Linkopedia October 2014
Here is our monthly selection of interesting knowledge material on programming, software testing and project management. This month you will find some interesting information and opinions about managing code duplication, product backlog prioritization, engineering management, organizational culture, mobile testing, code reuse and big data.
Blog: Practical Guide to Code Clones (Part 1)
Blog: Practical Guide to Code Clones (Part 2)
Blog: Selecting Backlog Items By Cost of Delay
Blog: WIP and Priorities – how to get fast and focused!
Blog: 44 engineering management lessons
Article: Do’s an
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Software Requirements Blog - Seilevel.com: When to Release a Product
One of the projects I’ve been working on over the past year has been particularity challenging; it’s one of those everything that can go wrong does go wrong projects. This is a back office product which automates a process updating data records. The updates are transactional. We were almost done and ready to release when […]
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From the Editor of Methods & Tools: Software Development Conferences Forecast October 2014
Here is a list of software development related conferences and events on Agile ( Scrum, Lean, Kanban) software testing and software quality, programming (Java, .NET, JavaScript, Ruby, Python, PHP) and databases (NoSQL, MySQL, etc.) that will take place in the coming weeks and that have media partnerships with the Methods & Tools software development magazine.
W-JAX 2014, November 3-7 2014, Munich, Germany
Business Technology Days 2014, November 3-6, Munich, Germany
QCon San Francisco, November 3-7 2014, San Francisco, USA
Exclusive $50 Method & Tools discount with promo code “softdevco
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Software Requirements Blog - Seilevel.com: Focus on Outcomes…not Solutions
I had a conversation a few weeks ago with an executive at a large organization, and he mentioned that he had read an interesting article a few weeks back on how Business Analysts should be focusing on the outcomes, and not on solutions. He was surprised at the suggestion of the article, and wanted to […]
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Software Requirements Blog - Seilevel.com: Aligning User Expectations with Business Objectives
Projects with clearly defined business objectives can and do fail even if they deliver functionality that syncs closely with the business objectives defined for the project, but do not meet user expectations. This may seem counter intuitive at first blush since the primary purpose of any enterprise software development effort is to deliver tangible financial […]
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Software Requirements Blog - Seilevel.com: The Perils of Being a BA
I’ve been in the software business for a while now – as a programmer, a project manager, and a business analyst. I think it’s affecting the way my synapses fire. Everywhere I experience poor customer service or encounter a web site that doesn’t work well, I get all tied up in knots. What’s worse, I’ll […]
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Good Requirements - Jeffrey Davidson: 20 Quotes about BDD and Agile Analysis
Kickstart Academy, a training organization where you get access to experts started a podcast series and I was privileged enough to be involved recently. Watch (click the image above or watch on Youtube) as Chris Matts interviews Kent McDonald, Jake Calabrese, and myself about the use and misuse of Given-When-Then, Behavior Driven Development (BDD), and business analysis in agile.
There were some great quotes (tweetable moments) and here are 20 of my favorite:
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Software Requirements Blog - Seilevel.com: Big Data Challenges in Regulated Industries
I have been working with a large financial services company on a “big data” project. Let me qualify the term “big data” for the purpose of this discussion. We are talking of dealing directly with about 10 million records and indirectly about 100 million records. The direct records (approximately 10 million) are those that are […]
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Software Requirements Blog - Seilevel.com: BA Advice Column
Have a knotty problem at work? Need help navigating the treacherous waters of a crazy project? Just ask Betty the Business Analyst! She’s here to drop some wisdom on you for the asking. ——————– Dear Betty, I was sitting in a meeting today when my stakeholder started swearing quietly, in French. What should I have […]
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More Pages to Explore .....
