Articles for 'Karl Wiegers'

Several conditions make it appropriate to leave the requirements descriptions at a higher level of abstraction. Recognize that these are broad guidelines. The BA should perform a risk-benefit analysis to balance the potential downside of omitting important information against the effort required to include it.

Recently I was chatting at a wine tasting event with a couple of lawyers, who I had just met. One was surprisingly inquisitive about my work in the software requirements arena. Apparently she was working on case involving software at that very time. At one point she asked me, “How do you know how detailed to make the requirements?”

The path to building great software goes through requirements management. It’s easy to forget some times, but the world relies on great software.  Software is everywhere. Whether you’re building a revenue-generating product or an internal system, your company’s overall success largely relies on your software team’s success.

 Software managers sometimes assume that every skilled programmer is also proficient at interviewing customers and writing requirements specifications, without any training, resources or coaching. This isn't a reasonable assumption. Like testing, estimation and project management, requirements engineering has its own skill set and body of know...

 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...

Be it explicitly or not, someone always performs the role of requirements analyst on a software project. The official title may be requirements engineer, business analyst, system analyst, product manager, or simply analyst , but someone needs to translate multiple perspectives into a requirements specification and communicate with other stakeholder...

Customers are never thrilled to find out they can’t get all the features they want in release 1.0 of a new software product (at least, not if they want the features to work). However, if the development team cannot deliver every requirement by the scheduled initial delivery date, the project stakeholders must agree on which subset to implemen...

The path to quality software begins with excellent requirements. Slighting the processes of requirements development and management is a common cause of software project frustration and failure. This article describes ten common traps that software projects can encounter if team members and customers don’t take requirements seriously. I descr...