In a discussion with a colleague this week, I was trying to articulate how writing business capability requirements can help guide both development and software acquisition processes. My explanation apparently was not very good, because he definitely got the impression that I was talking about some super strategic high level requirement that was not really…
When Scope Is Variable
I have been working on an "Agile" product with our IT Project Standards and Governance group at work. When analyzing the values and principles that are espoused in our "gated" product, I realize that the difference between agile and traditional (waterfall) project methodologies is singular. There is all kinds of hyperbole around why agile solves…
Software Capability Requirements
As stated in Business Capability Requirements, software capability requirements are correlated with a business capability requirement that answers the key questions why and how much. Systems designers, architects, and developers are better equipped to propose solutions, when they are aware of the benefits or value that a requester is expecting for their investment. They are…
Metaphor Exploration
When evaluating a software product, one of the most important things to understand is the core metaphors around which the software is built. Why do I use the term metaphor, rather than entity or concept? Because a metaphor is a substitute, a proxy, and in software, the core concepts are proxies for real concepts in…
Metahpor Explanation
When evaluauting a software product, one of the most important things to understand is the core metaphors around which the software is built. Why do I use the term metaphor, rather than entity or concept? Because a metaphor is a substitute, a proxy, and in software, the core concepts are proxies for real concepts in…
Practice, Rehearsal or Exercise
As leaders, we need to better distinguish between these three activities. In three domains that are "performance" domains, these words have somewhat different connotations. Professionals: Doctors and Lawyers practice – that is they perform their profession. They do not rehearse, nor do they exercise, at least they do not differentiate between the performance of their…
Business Capability Requirements
Many times when software requirements are collected, organized and documented, the focus is on the software capabilities needed. But software capabilities are not sufficient to get business value. One must also document the expected pattern of integrating the software capabilities into the business process to understand how the value will be realized. Stating requirements in…
Vendor Evaluation Framework
When your organization is a consumer of software capabilities and a producer of software capabilities, every project may be subject to a buy versus build decision. Many organizations struggle to have a rational repeatable process to make these decisions. Turf battles between IT and functional business units, personalities, experiences and emotions often become involved in…
The Cause
Causes of problems are sometimes elusive. Symptoms are misleading, reporters expectations are misguided, layers of business process and automation, and years of workarounds and patch jobs render the situation very confusing. The cause of a problem has a category related to it's proximity to the symptom revealing component: Local cause – when analysis reveals that…
Design vs. Specifications
Discussion about what constitute design vs. specifications has been a part of many projects and systems product teams that I have been on. In some groups we built detailed specifications for every component, and other groups just focused on the assembly of the parts in the design, and let each developer build the parts her…