This is the seventh in a series of posts that began with “How to Capture Software Requirements Using Story Roadmaps”. The focus of this final post is the user stories. If you’ve been following this series since the beginning, you already know how to write good user stories. The INVEST model coupled with the standard […]
This is the sixth in a series of posts that began with “How to Capture Software Requirements Using Story Roadmaps”. It started with goals and will end with stories. The focus of this post is epics. If your software development team has gotten this far along on the User Story Roadmap, the epics should be […]
This is the fifth in a series of posts that began with “How to Capture Software Requirements Using Story Roadmaps”. The focus of this post is themes. Agile software development projects usually rely on user stories as the primary vehicle for capturing software requirements. Yet, user stories are often criticized for being disjointed and confusing. […]
This is the fourth in a series of posts that began with “How to Capture Software Requirements Using Story Roadmaps”. The focus of this post is stakeholder needs. Now that you know the goals of the project and who really cares about reaching them, it’s time to consider needs. Every stakeholder has needs. If the […]
This is the third in a series of posts that began with “How to Capture Software Requirements Using Story Roadmaps”. The focus of this post is stakeholders. The importance of stakeholders in any enterprise software project cannot be overstated. Let me say that again … The importance of stakeholders in any enterprise software project cannot […]
This is the second in a series of posts that began with “How to Capture Software Requirements Using Story Roadmaps”. The focus of this post is business goals. Every project needs a goal or a set of goals. These are high-level descriptions of the context for the project and the business value to be delivered. […]
There’s much disagreement among software practitioners about how to capture requirements. Some argue in favor of lengthy, detailed documentation. With equal vigor, others argue in favor of simple tools like user stories. What should you do? There are valid arguments on both sides. Detailed requirements documentation can supply levels of insight that are hard to […]
Okay. I admit it. I’m not a big fan of burndown charts for tracking software release progress. You can flip them over and call them burnup charts but I’m still not a believer. Here’s why. The burndown chart has an end goal. That goal is total user story points expected to be delivered for the […]
Don’t you wish that headline was true? It’s not. There is no easy button for enterprise software development. Building software applications is a dichotomy (or worse) when it comes to the time required. Building a small standalone software application with a narrow scope is easy. Many of us have done it — often in a […]
Most software applications include an “undo” feature. It’s great, isn’t it? You can change something and if you don’t like the result, simply undo it. How cool is that! Wouldn’t it be equally cool if software development teams could implement changes to software applications and if the users don’t like them, undo? This would be […]
The folks over at the non-profit group, Software Assurance Forum for Excellence in Code (SAFECode) have published a great document called “Practical Security Stories and Security Tasks for Agile Development Environments”. Here is the direct link to the PDF file. It’s a 34-page document that undoubtedly required a lot of work by a number of […]
What the stakeholders and end users don’t want is just as important as what they do want. This is especially true of upgrades or enhancements to existing systems. It’s common to get caught in the flow of the existing design and to just keep doing more of the same. Here’s an example. Let’s say your […]
Writing user stories for agile software development can be a challenge for any Product Owner. Stories are supposed to deliver business value. What’s that? Stories are supposed to be vertical slices. Slices of what exactly? At times, we get overly bogged down in words and their definitions. We take things too literally and get stuck. […]
So your company uses a waterfall approach to software development and you’re stuck with it. Your management doesn’t understand agile development and doesn’t want to. They like how work gets done even if projects often take longer than they’d like. Now what? Other than finding another job, your options are limited. Here are ten suggestions […]
Some folks criticize agile approaches to software development like Scrum, Kanban and XP, with the claim that there’s too much emphasis on the end user. How can you develop software systems that are robust, fast and secure using stories? End users are not going to write stories defining the technical characteristics of a system. That […]
The subject of Scrum team velocity can be confusing and controversial. My intent is not to add fuel to the fire but rather, to contribute to the knowledge base around velocity and what it represents. The simplest way to do this is via an example. Let’s say a Scrum team has an average velocity of […]
What is one of the biggest impediments to adopting agile development? It’s a bit of a rhetorical question because there are many answers, with cultural issues being high on the list. For this post, I’d like to focus on legacy software. Every established company has software systems that are used everyday and may have been […]
Estimating the delivery date for a software application can be notoriously difficult. Miscalculations of 100% or more are surprisingly common. Let’s examine a couple of possible situations. 1) You’re working in a software-as-a-service environment like Salesforce.com or Microsoft Dynamics. The stakeholders want to know how long it will take to add a simple feature. You […]
Setting user-story priorities is hard work. Defining the sequence or order in which work gets done is even harder. Priorities are not enough. Want to be more agile? You need to manage the order in which work gets done — sprint by sprint. Here’s the problem. Take an agile software development team using Scrum, Kanban, […]
I’d like you to try this experiment. Take a planning activity that you and your software development team perform on a regular or intermittent basis and cut the allotted time to one tenth of what is normally expected. That’s it. Try it! You read that correctly. You get 10% of the time that the activity […]