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| Articles and White Papers
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» Best Practices for Agile/Lean Documentation
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| Ideally, an agile document is just barely good enough, or just barely sufficient, for the situation at hand. Documentation is an important part of agile software development projects, but unlike traditionalists who often see documentation as a risk reduction strategy, agilists typically see documentation as a strategy which increases overall projec... |
» Understanding the Specifications Puzzle
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| Defining specifications for the design and development of systems and software is a lot like this classic Gershwin song and what I personally regard as the biggest cause of confusion in the Information Technology field for as long as I can remember, which is over 30 years in the industry. Some people say specifications should be based on the ... |
» Functional Specification - a Tutorial
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| What Is A Functional Specification?
Functional specifications (functional specs), in the end, are the blueprint for how you want a particular web project or application to look and work. It details what the finished product will do, how a user will interact with it, and what it will look like. By creating a blueprint of the product first, time an... |
» Breathing life into “living documents”
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| A multitude of sins can be hidden behind the phrase “living document.” You can submit documents that are incomplete or inconsistent as long as you promise to fix it later. In this month’s issue of Strategic Software Engineering, I want to talk about the strategic importance of being realistic about the state of knowledge, plans an... |
» Introduction to Requirements: The Critical Details That Make or Break a Project
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| Every project has requirements. It doesn't matter if it's building hardware solutions, developing software solutions, installing networks, protecting data, or training users. For the project to be a success, knowing what the requirements are is an absolute must.
Requirements exist for virtually any components of a project or task. For example, a p... |
» Requirements When the Field Isn’t Green
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| Most books and articles on software requirements are written as though you’re gathering requirements for a brand-new product—what’s sometimes called a green-field project. In reality, few people have that opportunity on every project. Many developers work on maintenance projects. In such a project you’re usually adding... |
» How to Document Use Cases
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| A use case represents a case of use of a system, ideally one that captures a functional requirement in terms of an identifiable and testable goal. So, what is the best way to document a use case? Approaches to content range from diagrammatic to textual, formal to free form, expansive and detailed to brief and abstract. The approaches to tool usage ... |
» Painless Functional Specifications - Part 4: Tips
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| In this fourth and final part of the series I'll share some of my advice for writing good specs.
The biggest complaint you'll hear from teams that do write specs is that "nobody reads them." When nobody reads specs, the people who write them tend to get a little bit cynical. It's like the old Dilbert cartoon in which engineers use stacks of 4-inc... |
» Painless Functional Specifications - Part 3: But... How?
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| Now that you've read all about why you need a spec and what a spec has in it, let's talk about who should write them.
Who writes specs?
Let me give you a little Microsoft history here. When Microsoft started growing seriously in the 1980s, everybody there had read The Mythical Man-Month, one of the classics of software management. (If you haven'... |
» Painless Functional Specifications - Part 2: What's a Spec?
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| This series of articles is about functional specifications, not technical specifications. People get these mixed up. I don't know if there's any standard terminology, but here's what I mean when I use these terms.
A functional specification describes how a product will work entirely from the user's perspective. It doesn't care how the thing is i... |
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