Software Best Practices

That should be the real question that any project should ask. Far too often the purpose of project work is to make lot of different customers happy. We get requirements from every Tom, ***, and Harry, from the business, from marketing, from sales, from the technology gurus, from the people who will have...

If you build EXACTLY what “they” tell you, you do it in the timeframe they ask for, and at the cost they wanted to pay, is that a successful project? The project is On time On budget Delivers the requested functionality No defects The team is ready for the next project Is it successful? “Yes,” you say...

I recently went with trepidation into a class with Pragmatic Marketing called “ Requirements that Work ”, part of their Practical Product Management series. Marketing professionals have been my foil for bad requirements for years and here I was, ready to hear from the experts themselves how marketing...

Well, I better rephrase that. The functional part of a requirement is cheap. I can deliver the functional part of a requirement in as little time and in as small of a cost as you like if you let me control the non-functional parts of the requirement. That is a heck of a claim. So how do I back that up...

I am trying to understand technical software specifications. My own experience is quite controversial and varied. Overall my impressions are that technical specifications are not well understood and not used much. 1. Identity - what is it? The technical spec is not the same as the functional spec. Joel...

Steve McConnell put up a post on his lack of a real estimate for a child's fort and how that was related to a software project. I have a similar example of an agile bathroom remodel. The Story Our existing bathroom had a small problem. Water was leaking through cracks somewhere in the older tile...

Hello Earl, You got it. Well, unfortunately here, not even risk management we have at this customer. Jumping to the third point, I have already done that on one project and my company have done what I asked, moved me to another customer. About using these best practices I agree that we should use them...

Ok. Thank you. But I have new question about requirements :) In Steve McConnell's book I read that User Guide can replace software requirements specification in small projects. Currently, I have following documents containing requirements: Software requirements specification (the very first requirements...

But does the "to-be" nature of requirements make them fundamentally different than the "should-have" nature of a defect? In common, though, is the demand for team time. That is, both the defect and the requirement are a request to have the team spend time modifying the work to behave...

[quote user="talmans"]you need to know if precision requirements are truly needed[/quote] Excellent point and you also identify one of the factors. Knowledge is perishable, so increasing the delay between creating and consuming requirements increases the need for more overhead (setting context...