One of the unfortunate aspects of industry-level paradigm shifts, such as what we're seeing with the move to agile software development, is that the followers of the incumbent paradigm often get to set the tone of the conversation. A perfect example of this is that traditionalists will often claim that agile approaches are riskier than traditional ...

Several software projects are over budgeted or have to face failures during operations. One big reason of this is Software Company develops wrong software due to wrong interpretation of requirements. Requirements engineering is one of the well known discipline within Software engineering which deals with this problem. RE is the process of eliciti...

Business Analysis is a straightforward process of analysing business change requirements. Why, then, are there so many methods, approaches, techniques and tools for doing what is – essentially – the same job? In order to understand this, we need to rewind a bit in time to look at where Business Analysis came from, where it currently is ...

Extreme programming (XP) introduced the practice of expressing requirements in the form of user stories, short descriptions of functionality–told from the perspective of a user–that are valuable to either a user of the software or the customer of the software. The following are typical user stories for a job posting and search site: ...

As long as practitioners recognize that use case diagrams are optional and iconic (as opposed to schematic), they shouldn't have problems. The diagrams are useful, for example, on whiteboards as a way of sketching and framing an agenda while people are writing up and reviewing use case detail on index cards. The trouble starts, however, when pr...

I was recently helping a friend staff a fairly large project with a team of very experienced, very skilled people. I mentioned that people were really excited about the opportunity. He asked me “Why are they excited? What is it about this project that makes people want to work on it?”

That led us to a discussion about teams of highly skilled people and what motivates them to want to work on a project.

Author: Geri Schneider Winters

* Article used with permission from Wyyzzk, Inc.’s Resources for Business Analysts site at http://www.writingusecases.com This website of reports and tips contains information to help you succeed as a Business Analyst in IT.

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...

We know that we must involve all the stakeholders if we want to discover a project’s requirements. But we need some guidelines on how to involve the right people and, given how busy everyone is, how to minimize the time and maximize the result. In this article, requirements expert Ellen Gottesdiener (www.ebgconsulting.com) shares her consider...

A whitepaper written by requirements expert Ellen Gottesdiener of EBG Consulting (www.ebgconsulting.com) for IBM/Rational Software. As an analyst, you have the crucial task of defining the requirements for software that is to be built or acquired. Your task is crucial for a number of reasons. If software teams fail to define excellent requirements...

A set of 25 serious (and somewhat cynical) guides for abusing use cases by requirements expert Ellen Gottesdiener, of EBG Consulting, Inc. (www.ebgconsulting.com). Author: Ellen Gottesdiener

In the Unified Modeling Language (UML), use cases are visually represented as ellipses. However, in spite of its popularity and size, UML has little of practical use to offer modelers beyond this simple iconic representation. Trying to capture and present requirements using just use case diagrams can often render the otherwise useful technique of u...

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...

Beverley Head interviews Australian CIOs and Technology managers on the role of the business analyst. Insights like: "I find that business analysts are more critical (thinking) than project managers." "...finding an equally business savvy and IT smart business analyst is unlikely." "Success for the business analyst is...