From the category archives:

Current Capabilities Assessment Series

Reverse Engineering Requirements: Synthesize, Document, and Validate!

March 13, 2009 by Laura (Brandau) Brandenburg

Once you’ve interviewed subject matter experts to understand their business processes and how they use the functionality provided by the system, you’ll most likely be sitting in a state of “information overload.” Trust that this is part of the process of gaining a comprehensive understanding of the system and start working towards creating your end [...]

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Reverse Engineering Testable Requirements–SQuAD 2009

March 11, 2009 by Laura (Brandau) Brandenburg

I’m experimenting with slide share and sharing my presentation for the 2009 Software Quality Assurance of Denver conference!  Looking forward to it!
Reverse Engineering Testable Requirements
View more presentations from ClearSpringBA.

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Are you fully leveraging your current technologies?

February 11, 2009 by Laura (Brandau) Brandenburg

Taking the time to conduct a complete assessment of your organization’s technology-driven capabilities can be a time-consuming and expensive undertaking. However, not expending the time or effort sets you up to miss potential opportunities to create more value from your technologies.
Here are some possible outcomes delivered when the assessment is coupled with other efforts:

Make an [...]

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Reverse Engineering Testable Requirements: Interviewing Business Subject Matter Experts

January 28, 2009 by Laura (Brandau) Brandenburg

When trying to uncover the functionality of an existing system, the most critical activity you will perform is interviewing stakeholders.  Everything you’ve done up until now equates to a pre-game warm-up.  Now it’s time for kick-off.
Note: This is a follow-on post from “Create a Work Plan” and post #5 of the Current Capabilities Assessment series.
Interviewing [...]

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The multiple perspectives of a Current Capabilities Assessment

January 21, 2009 by Laura (Brandau) Brandenburg

A Current Capabilities Assessment provides an analysis of  the existing functionality of a current system. Over and above a pure reverse engineering of “what” the system does, a valuable assessment of capabilities provides a blend of business process, functional specifications, and technical design to achieve specific business goals.

This picture articulates something we all know intuitively, [...]

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Reverse engineering requirements: Create a Work Plan

January 7, 2009 by Laura (Brandau) Brandenburg

By now you are probably ready to start meeting with stakeholders to elicit requirements.  You’ve found a business sponsor, scoped your project, and learned a lot exploring the system.  It’s valuable to pause and create a plan of attack before diving into your stakeholder meetings.  Having a plan will keep you organized and make the [...]

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Reverse Engineering Requirements: Select a Business Owner and Identify Scope

November 26, 2008 by Laura (Brandau) Brandenburg

If you are given license to start reverse engineering a legacy system into requirements, also known as a “current capabilities assessment”, it’s often tempting to jump right in and start documenting. But before you do that it’s important to lay the groundwork for your task.  You’ll want to identify a business owner and define scope [...]

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Reverse engineering testable requirements

October 31, 2008 by Laura (Brandau) Brandenburg

I’m working on a presentation to potentially be presented at the Software Quality Assurance Association of Denver (a.k.a SQuAD) conference in March 2009 on “Reverse Engineering Testable Requirements”.  Building on my recent post on dealing with legacy systems, it’s clear that we are in often in situations where testers are brought in to help get [...]

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