Entries for 'adrian'

There are many problems associated with requirements engineering, including problems in defining the system scope, problems in fostering understanding among the different communities affected by the development of a given system, and problems in dealing with the volatile nature of requirements. These problems may lead to poor requirements and the c...

The requirements engineering phase of software development projects is characterised by the intensity and importance of communication activities. During this phase, the various stakeholders must be able to communicate their requirements to the analysts, and the analysts need to be able to communicate the specifications they generate back to the sta...

A fundamental reality of application development is that the user interface is the system to the users. What users want is for developers to build applications that meet their needs and that are easy to use. Too many developers think that they are artistic geniuses – they do not bother to follow user interface design standards or invest the e...

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...

What: Describes the CBAP (Certified Business Analysis Professional) certification, What: Knowledge Areas of the IIBA's BABOK (Business Analysis Boyd of Knowledge), Why: List some benefits of having a CBAP (Certified Business Analysis Professional) certification, How: Locate the CBAP certification requirements, How: Learn some tips to help ...

In the larger context of life, it is very clear that negotiation skills are very important and that those that have them are better off than those who don’t. What about in business analysis? Are negotiation skills important? The answer is an emphatic: YES! You bet they are! Business analysts negotiate or facilitate negotiations at...

If you are an IT professional in India, thinking of working abroad, you might want to consider a business/systems analyst position. Why? It’s a position in high demand with high earning potential and which can serve as a great foundation for moving up the corporate ladder into management or business operations. In Money Magazine’s Be...

 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...

The software industry is exhibiting an increasing interest in requirements engineering — that is, understanding what you intend to build before you’re done building it. Despite the hype of "Internet time," companies across many business domains realize that time spent understanding the business problem is an excellent investme...

This paper is intended to provide a high-level overview and introduction to the Business Process Modeling Notation (BPMN). The context and general uses for BPMN will be provided as a supplement to the technical details defined the BPMN 1.0 Specification, which has been recently completed and released to the public. The basics of the BPMN notation w...

Effective communication among application development project stakeholders is often challenging, especially when the team is geographically distributed or time constrained. IBM® Rational® software helps organizations automate, integrate, and govern the core business process of software and systems delivery via the IBM Rational Software Delivery Pla...

In the last few years, the agile software development movement has created a paradigm shift in how we work to understand system requirements. Agile teams shape software systems using a collaborative process, with executable software at its heart and documents marginalised to a peripheral role. This creates a fundamental shift away from tools for ma...

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 ...

A few years ago I took a photograph an old wooden tombstone. The tombstone read, “Walter Crumbly, Hanged by Mistake – Sorry Walter.” It seems like the software industry wants to collectively hang the waterfall software development method and structured methods. In the not too distant future the software development industry will wake up and realize...

This paper provides an in-depth introduction to the new BPMN standard, illustrating how it is used to model business processes and web services. The paper also provides greater detail on how BPMN fits within BPM, BPEL’s, BPMS’s, UML and other new industry standards and initiatives described above.