Articles
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18 Questions to Ask for Better Backlog Refinement Refinement is time spent during the current sprint discussing and elaborating product backlog items so that they are ready for future sprints. Unfortunately, many teams do not unlock the full potential of refinement. Backlog items should be sliced, and a solution should be proposed, reviewed, and discussed. If your team is having trouble getting started, here are 18 questions you can use to trigger refinement discussions. |
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Overcoming Challenges to Good Test Documentation Getting good test documentation is a consistent challenge. Agile proposes that you should go very light on documentation, and while test documentation does not need to be heavy, it does need to be clear and cover all that the product is intended to do so you can ensure testing is consistent and results are recorded. Here's how to overcome some major barriers to getting good test documentation. |
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Requirements Mapping Using Business Function Test Suites On this team, testers were overcommitted, avoidable defects were surfacing, and documentation was hard to find. Worse, trust and morale were low. Upgrading tools was out of the question, so the testers decided to take matters into their own hands and create incremental change themselves. Here's how a team added a new type of traceability to its requirement test case world. |
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Fitting Technical Writing into Agile Development As teams strive to move to a mature agile process, technical writers must adapt as effectively as the development personnel. This new agile process demands that knowledge dealing with software or product releases is only sparingly documented up front, making the technical writer's job of gathering information much more dependent on talking with people over reading requirements. |
Better Software Magazine Articles
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10 Lessons Learned in Cross-Platform Development Building an app for a single platform is difficult, but designing, implementing, and testing an app targeting multiple operating system platforms can be next to impossible. The secret balances upfront design with customer feedback. |
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Requirements Reuse: Fantasy or Feasible? Software development teams think nothing about reusing code, but what about requirements? The benefits include faster delivery, lower development costs, consistency across and within applications, fewer defects, and reduced rework. |
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Simplicity and Precision: Test Planning in Agile Projects Test planning is often thought unnecessary in an agile project. However, if our mindset is on "planning" rather than "plans," we see that test-planning activities happen throughout the project, taking advantage of levels of precision, i.e., what is absolutely necessary at each level. |
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Why Do Requirements Matter? A series of dining mishaps leads Lee to reflect on why mistakes happen in spite of well-defined requirements. |
Interviews
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The Essential Product Owner—Championing Successful Products: An Interview with Ellen Gottesdiener
Video
In this interview, Ellen Gottesdiener talks about her presentation at Agile Development Conference and Better Software Conference West 2014, the importance of having context for requirements, good ways to set value considerations for requirements, and the common mistakes of product owners. |
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On Enterprise-Level Agile and Software Development: An Interview with Dr. Charles Suscheck
Video
Dr. Charles Suscheck is a nationally recognized agile leader who specializes in agile software development adoption at the enterprise level. In this interview, Charles discusses enterprise-level agile and Scrum, convincing management to take to agile, and what the new year will bring us. |
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Leverage Social Media for Requirements Gathering: An Interview with Stefano Rizzo
Podcast
Stefano Rizzo introduces the idea of using social media to encourage customers to get involved in the requirements gathering process. Learn how by introducing something that your customers are already contributing towards, you can capture the mood behind their true wants and needs. |
Conference Presentations
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Exploring Our Love-Hate Relationship with Metrics
Slideshow
Businesses rely on data to make decisions, and metrics allow them to roll up data into bite-sized morsels for managerial consumption. But while metrics can help leaders make good business decisions, sometimes the numbers are “massaged” in a way that doesn’t realistically portray what’s happening. Ultimately, there’s validity on both sides of the debate: Sometimes metrics imply something totally different from reality, but other times, they provide valuable insights that can guide efforts with better questions and decisions about how projects or teams should proceed. Shaun Bradshaw—aka the Minister of Metrics—will discuss various aspects of metrics, particularly how they relate to product quality. We'll explore the dysfunctions arising from “objective” metrics, as well as what makes metrics useful and how they can be used for good. |
Shaun Bradshaw
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Storytelling Techniques for Better Requirements
Slideshow
Do you struggle with making your ideas clear and understandable to others? Does it annoy you to sit in requirements sessions for hours only to leave with more questions than answers? As human beings, we’re made for storytelling. It is a natural form of communication. So, Jeff Howey... |
Jeff Howey
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Improv(e) Your Requirements
Slideshow
Improvisational comedy—sometimes called improv—is a form of theater in which the performance is created spontaneously, in the moment. Successful improvisers learn and use a variety of skills and techniques which allow them to better extract ideas, expand on them, and make them meaningful... |
Damian Synadinos
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From Unclear and Unrealistic Requirements to Achievable User Stories
Slideshow
"What do you want the system to do?" can be a loaded question for agile teams. Ideally, the product owner gives you a product backlog with fully groomed user stories prioritized by business value, ready for team discussion and estimation. Instead, you may have the “big picture” product... |
Jamie Lynn Cooke
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