requirements

Some agile teams rely on user stories alone to articulate requirements, struggle with requirements rework on large agile projects, and spend too much time thrashing on requirements during iterations. Requirements expert and agile coach, Ellen Gottesdiener shares a wide spectrum of requirements practices ranging from traditional to agile to help you break out of the cookie-cutter mentality that some take toward requirements elicitation. Practitioners from a traditional environment learn how classic requirements practices are adapted on agile projects. Agile practitioners learn how they may lighten, tighten, or incorporate a subset of traditional requirements practices to mitigate risks associated with missing, erroneous, or conflicting requirements. Gain an appreciation of ways to adapt requirements practices to fit various project situations so you can do the right things for your project.

A prevailing myth in the software industry is that business analysis requires a bloated requirements elicitation and documentation process. Although the Business Analysis Body of Knowledge (BABOK) is considered to be process agnostic, many business analysts create heavy requirements when they follow this document's guidelines. Bob Hartman busts this myth by explaining how to use generally accepted practices from the BABOK in an agile way. Drawing directly from the BABOK, Bob bridges the gap that many business analysts have regarding lightweight process, especially as it relates to larger projects and organizations. Gain the ability to use BABOK practices in an agile environment and develop an understanding of how to use them in more agile ways in traditional software development. Learn to eliminate waste in any bloated process and become comfortable regardless of the development methodology you use.

Classification trees are a structured, visual approach to identify and categorize equivalence class partitions for test objects. They enable testers to create better test cases faster. Classification trees visually document test requirements to make them easy to create and comprehend. Julie Gardiner explains this powerful technique and how it helps all stakeholders understand exactly what is involved in testing and offers an easier way to validate test designs. Using examples, Julie shows you how to create classification trees, how to construct test cases from them, and how they complement other testing techniques in every stage of testing. Julie demonstrates a free classification tree editing tool that helps you build, maintain, display, and use classification trees.

It's easy to list all the stakeholders and identify different types of users for your software project-WRONG! Although it may be obvious who holds the checkbook for your project and who the "average" users will be, many other people and user roles are not so obvious. Unaccounted for stakeholders and users result in missed requirements and often leave important conflicts unresolved. Even worse, you can lose support-and the whole project can fail-if important people are left out of the process. As Linda Westfall demonstrates unique "brain writing" techniques in a facilitated, interactive requirements workshop, you will learn ways to identify a complete list of the important project stakeholders and user roles. After pruning the stakeholder list to eliminate duplicates, Linda demonstrates how to define a requirements elicitation strategy to select appropriate techniques for each stakeholder.