The 6+1 Essential Questions that define a Requirements Approach
Posted on October 28th, 2018
Also published in a revised form on LinkedIn October 24th, 2018
These days much our thinking seems to have been reduced to simple binary choices. In reality, most problems worth our attention are multi-dimensional by nature.
The agile vs. traditional requirements debate is no exception.
For me, ...
Agile BA in KL
Posted on October 23rd, 2018
Just completed my 'Agile Business Analysis' course in Kuala Lumpur with a great group of participants who asked some challenging questions.
In response to some of their questions, I drew this diagram on the whiteboard in an attempt to summarise the major themes of the course.
As the title sug...
The Software Testing Canvas
Posted on October 13th, 2018
The Software Testing Canvas is a tool for closing the gap between software testing theory and practice. In this presentation we take a guided tour of the Software Testing Canvas and explain how teams can use it as a collaborative tool for understanding, exploring and describing software testing s...
Will Anyone Read an Article About Documentation?
Posted on October 6th, 2018
I am pleased with the response to the articles I have published on LinkedIn, but a total lack of interest in one article surprised me. The rhetorical question How can agile teams produce comprehensive documentation? seemed like a great title to me because it was echoing one of the values in the ...
Rebooting the Use Case Diagram
Posted on September 28th, 2018
Use cases have fallen out of favour in recent times with user stories becoming the preferred way for teams to manage requirements. For a good discussion of the differences, see Gustav Bergman's older (but still relevant post) A Use Case is to a User Story as a Gazelle is to a Gazebo.
In the rush ...
The Software Testing Canvas
Posted on September 27th, 2018
I have to confess that I have become a bit of a canvas "junkie" ever since I discovered the Business Model canvas a few years back. Canvases summarise the wisdom of experts on a single page in a way that is easy for non-experts to understand. In fact the original Business Model Canvas summarise...
Agile Non-Functional Requirements
Posted on September 12th, 2018
I've just updated my post How Can Agile Teams Capture Non-Functional Requirements? to add a few clarifying diagrams from one of my courses. The post is now better aligned with the new post How Can Agile Teams Deliver Comprehensive Documentation?
Read together, the two posts present a workable...
The Test Automation Reference Model
Posted on September 11th, 2018
There is no shortage of test automation tools. The independent software testing company Cigniti maintains a list of 100 commercial and open source tools [1]. The web site Opensourcetesting.org features over 360 open source tools in 20 categories [2]. Add to this the vast array of tools that ar...
How Can Agile Teams Deliver Comprehensive Documentation?
Posted on September 11th, 2018
I remember one of my students getting quite angry as I explained how Scrum worked. He was a Business Analyst from a bank and he insisted that his management would never accept the total lack of documentation he thought I was proposing. His anger was quite reasonable as Elisabeth Kubler-Ross' chan...
What Happens to Sprint Backlog Items at the End of a Sprint?
Posted on September 11th, 2018
What happens to a Sprint Backlog Item at the end of a sprint? Does it have no further use? Should the team just tear up the story card and throw it away?
The Manifesto for Agile Software Development recommends that agile teams should:
value working software over comprehensive documentation [1]...
