Tighter acceptance criteria == lower cost, faster delivery, and higher quality. Do you agree? Here is one way to think about this as a practice.
Requirements
Information Driven Projects
When you look at software development or corporate change projects, you often see some creative fiction. There is fiction in the plans, fiction in the designs and fiction in the requirements. This fiction is created by the notion that “Before we can start, we have to know everything required to get to done.” Intuitively, we…
Feats Instead of Processes
In my last post on Software Capabilities and Feats I said that feats are better [to model in a software capability] than processes, because processes are merely organized, consistent, managed ways to accomplish the feat. A process is one way to accomplish a feat. The feat is the result you want. Process is constrained by…
Software Capabilities and Feats
In some recent conversations, I find that it is hard to explain the notion of a capability. People want to talk in terms of software features or project requirements. Software capabilities define value in the following ways: enabling the user to accomplish a “feat” in less time than they otherwise would. enabling the user to…
Smaller Bets (Story Elaboration Pushback)
It is always better to spend the least amount of (time, effort, money) to get what you want, right? If I can get a tasty meal for $10 why would I pay $30 or $200 – for the experience of eating – that isn’t about taste. That is a different thing, isn’t it. We have…
Packing The Box
Do you remember the last time you moved? Do you remember packing some boxes so full, that they were too heavy to lift after you were done? It happens. Especially books and vinyl records. When you are packing “regularly shaped” high density items, the volume of the box may be too large to contain the…
Better User Stories
While I will not claim to be an expert at writing user stories, I am experienced. It is not always enough to simply follow the pattern. Like any analysis pattern, there are some things that one can do to improve their stories.
The Appeal of User Stories
I have been “doing” user stories for a while, years now. I have been doing them mechanically without thinking about what makes them “good”. Not that I haven’t been working to make them better with each release on every project. My user stories have consistently grown better following the INVEST pattern. What I haven’t been…
A Response to the Myth Busters
In this post Glen Alleman retorts the commonly lauded platitude that: “There is no way to prove that the requirements we have are complete and correct until we have working code.” And as Glen is a very smart guy, from the perspective of the domains within which Glen most frequently works and thinks, his perspective…