From the category archives:

Requirements Specifications

Explore how to write better business, functional, and software requirements, organize documentation, analyze requirements, and create a software requirements specification.

Akk! The developers won’t use my requirements specs!

March 1, 2010 by Laura (Brandau) Brandenburg

Ask not what your developers can do for you, ask what you can do for your developers.
These past few weeks I’ve been practically overtaken by a waterfall of humbling experiences. To be perfectly blunt, the developers did not like my requirements specifications. It was hard to realize that I had failed to communicate requirements in [...]

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Use cases: a personal history (and a bit of a love affair)

February 8, 2010 by Laura (Brandau) Brandenburg

I recently discovered that even after 200 blog posts here, I’ve never written about a post about my beloved use cases! I guess I think that most of what there is to say has already been said. But we’ve each got our own story about how we discovered use cases, what we do with them, [...]

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Technical specifications and system documentation can take different forms

January 18, 2010 by Laura (Brandau) Brandenburg

Do you demand that your documentation serve double duty as a technical specification and a system document? While in the past I’ve done exactly that, my recent forays into more agile practices forced me to split how I see the value in various pieces of documentation.
Adriana has already shared her views on how BAs help [...]

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Requirements specifications: what to do when you must start from scratch

September 7, 2009 by Laura (Brandau) Brandenburg

In my recent post on requirements templates, I found that many of you fall into two very different camps. While some of you have formalized processes and sets of documentation requirements for your software projects (this can be helpful or hurtful), others have nothing. Those of you in the latter category feel you need to [...]

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How do you use your requirements templates?

August 26, 2009 by Laura (Brandau) Brandenburg

If your company has a full-fledged software development process along with pre-defined templates for creating deliverables at every stage of the process, do you find that the templates encourage good thinking or a fill-in-the-blanks strategy?
In my last three projects, I feel I’ve been lucky to work on teams where there is little formal process or [...]

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What can we learn from Twitter about writing good requirements?

June 8, 2009 by Laura (Brandau) Brandenburg

Adam Feldman started his new blog “Bright Ideas” off with a bang last week when he posted on “Requirements in 140 characters or less. Good idea?” In the post, he rewrote a long-worded requirement into a much shorter one, cutting ambiguous words and extra language to find a clear and concise requirement in an effort [...]

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The myth of the “requirements contract”

June 1, 2009 by Laura (Brandau) Brandenburg

A few weeks ago, I posted about how to validate requirements without a formal, tedious, requirements walk-through. Alex Papworth followed up with an interesting comment and question:
There is a point when you need commitment or signoff from stakeholders. This is necessary when estimates are provided and requirements need to be frozen (not talking Agile here, [...]

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What’s in your bag of tricks? Let’s collaborate on tools, techniques, and methods.

March 15, 2009 by Laura (Brandau) Brandenburg

There are no “best practices” only a bunch of good practices that work best in certain contexts. Do you agree? At last week’s SQuAD conference, this theme resounded over and over and one presenter even threw out the idea that as an IT profession, we are very limited in our set of tools and techniques, [...]

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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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An Agile Experience: My First User Stories

February 2, 2009 by Laura (Brandau) Brandenburg

Managing requirements and project planning via a shared concept of user stories is the crux of agile development, at least from my current BA viewpoint.  Over the past few weeks I’ve had the chance to “write” user stories and even see a few of them implemented and tested.  Overall, it’s been a positive experience.
First off, [...]

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