InfoQ Homepage Customers & Requirements Content on InfoQ
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Right-Size Your User Stories
For those using User Stories, getting them right is one of the difficult aspects of an Agile process - they can drive or bog down your work. Pat Kua recently addressed a key question: How much detail should you put in your story? The answer, of course, is "it depends" on where you are in the process.
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Discussion: Measuring Success of an Agile Project from the Customer’s Perspective
A recent discussion on the Scrum Development list looked at: “How does a customer measure the success of an Agile project?” Emphasis on: “measure”. The discussion seemed to agree that clients do need a way to track success in their terms, and various metrics were suggested, though it was agreed: it depends on the situation and the customer.
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Iterating and Incrementing to 'Get What You Need'
In "Don't know what I want, but I know how to get it", Jeff Patton described a few ways in which Agile teams and business users miscommunicate, and argued that the agile community needs to be clear about the terms 'iterating', 'incrementing' and 'shippable'.
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Successful Collaboration Doesn't Happen by Accident
Partnership Coach Michael Spayd tells us that both contractors and permanent employees can find themselves playing a "consultant" role, and should consider using consulting contracts or "designed partnerships" with their clients - not regarding the exchange of money, but to create a climate for stellar results for the client, while also communicating their own values and preferences.
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Charming the Army: the Power of Delivery
Here is a story about Agile's use in a governmental organisation: at the 2006 APLN Leadership Summit Mark Salamango and John Cunningham looked at the problems and opportunities of introducing Agile in Army environments. True Agile practices cannot be 'commanded' or 'directed’ but frequent delivery offers Agile leaders a "soft" kind of power that is, in fact, very effective.
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InfoQ Interview: Hugh Ivory on DSDM's Public "Atern" Release
DSDM has been called "the grandmother" of the agile methodologies, first released in 1995. Until recently it was only available to members but this year, for the first time, the DSDM Consortium made the "Atern" release available to the public. Director Hugh Ivory provided an overview at Agile2007, including a look at both old and new customer-facing roles in DSDM.
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Interview: Charles Simonyi on Intentional Software
Charles Simonyi, the President of Intentional Software and a recent space traveller presents his views on the future of software development. He talks about how to include domain experts in the development cycle by letting them express their intentions in domain specific languages, about Intentional's view on DSLs and Domain Driven Design and about what it was like to be a space tourist.
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Can architecture create a gap between developers and software they build?
Many software project management and architecture approaches tend to parcel out work on a project in a way to create hierarchical layers. This helps simplify both developers’ work and management. However, the underlying information shielding among layers can potentially create a gap between developers and the software they are building, if their tasks are totally taken out of functional context.
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Agile Contracts Require Trust
Contracts are the seam that tie together different organizations. Traditional contracts are based on mistrust and a CYA philosophy. Fixed price contracts don't take into consider the uncertainty of software development. Time-for-money projects are not based on value delivered - a team can work for a long time and not have much to show for. The Agile community is looking for something better.
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Multiple Projects, One Agile Team
It's not uncommon for an organization to have one group of developers who need to complete multiple projects. In those situations, how should the group be structured, and how should their work be planned and allocated?
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Is Quality Negotiable?
If a customer tells you that they are not interested in software quality, that they have a specific scope that must be completed by a specific date - what do you do? Do you listen to the customer and compromise quality? (By the way, what is quality?)
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An Agile PM Walks a Mile in a Customer's Shoes
Last year Ternary COO Alexia Bowers walked a mile in a project customer's shoes, and told us how it felt in this Agile2006 Leadership Summit presentation. She stressed the need to meet deadlines through creative solutions, instead of simply cutting scope.
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RSpec Adds Eagerly-Awaited RBehave Functionality for Integration Testing
RSpec is a Behaviour-Driven Development acceptance testing framework for Ruby or Java that enables developers to turn acceptance specifications from the business into executable examples of expected behaviour. Dan North built a separate extension, RBehave, to express story-level integration tests with RSpec. David Chelimsky has now incorporated RBehave-like functionality into the RSpec trunk.
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Next-Generation Functional Testing
What should the next generation of functional testing tools offer? The Agile Alliance is holding a workshop to envision the next-generation of functional testing tools, from October 11th to 12th. What do you think needs the most attention?
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Ted Neward's thoughts on Architecture Roles & Responsibilites
Ted Neward shares his thoughts on the roles and responsibilities of the Software Architect, discussing what an architect does, how to approach the role, and if architects are still relevant.