Requirements Defined - Seilevel's Software Requirements Blog

It's late stage of a project, so it's time to start worrying about your data migration requirements if you haven't already! If you have done it, good for you! You can just stop reading.But so many projects push this to the end and then panic when it doesn't go well....

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Luckily I have been working fairly consistently with the same client lately. This means that I haven’t had to constantly jot down notes during meetings on things to look up afterward, find corporate maps so I don’t get lost in symmetrical buildings with no windows, or remember not to call...

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Change Requests or CR from Business Users after an application has been deployed are an integral part of the Development Process. No matter how much care and thought went into the creation of the requirements on which the application was built, it is impossible to get everything right the first...

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Do you know who your audience is for your software requirements? Why, it’s the development organization, of course! And while that is true, development is the main audience for software requirements, there are many other audience members as well.1. Testing Team. I am sure that most of you also thought...

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We have been using Caliber for a few years and we recently decided to research whether there was a requirements management tool that more cleanly supported working offline. I actually wrote a bit about our vendor selection process and our search for a requirements tool awhile back, so if you...

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One of my pet peeves is password masking. I find nothing more frustrating than having a log-in rejected, and not being able to verify that it is correct because I can’t see the password. It was quite nice to find out I’m not alone. Jakob Nielsen’s article Stop Password Masking...

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We’ve just updated our suggested business requirements document template, though it can be used as a template for any type of requirements specification. You can find it here on our Resources page. One thing we strongly suggest is that you create and update requirements within a requirements management tool and...

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In this global environment, there is rarely a project we work on that doesn’t have some set of customer users in a remote location, inevitably overseas. While we are typically eliciting requirements in English, we are always faced with ESL customers. So here are a few tips I shared with...

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A year ago, I was working on a project where we created a list of features in Excel to help development understand at a high-level what would be in the new system we were building so that they could provide quick and dirty estimates. Out of these estimates, a solution...

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I have been on teams that created requirements for replacing old “Green Screen” mainframe applications and have also observed the work of my colleagues on similar projects. The observations here are based on our experiences with these efforts and offer suggestions to anyone who is about to embark on...

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As someone who is part of the family of requirements professionals, it is always exciting to find a new source of writings on the subject that is near and dear to our heart. I recently discovered the Blueprint Software blog that can be found here....

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We are hoping to reach out to Haiti with a little SeiHelp in the form of much needed clothing! We are collecting summer clothes and Rob will deliver them to a relative in Waco. She has arranged to deliver them to the Bahamas where she knows a lot of Haitians...

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Prioritizing and identifying requirements that get developed in a release cycle can be a tricky proposition. It is one of the most important things we do as Product Managers. It is also one of the most challenging.Most organizations use some means of categorizing requirements. Two common examples...

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It's that time of year we all look so forward to, when we get to wish our colleagues around the requirements world a bit of SeiCheer with our holiday medley of songs. And worry not, if the 2009 collection isn't enough for you, you can go back in history and...

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Pack your bags folks, we are heading to Australia in 2010! I'm excited to post the first call for papers (CFP) for IEEE's RE'10, held in Sydney Australia next September. I'll copy the key components of the CFP here, but visit the link for more details. I'm excited about this...

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I am a huge fan of Thiagi's work on games to use in training. He has made many games publicly available for use in your own training environments. In the past I've done some writing (here) about how we've adapted his games to Requirements Engineering training courses. But today I...

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This post is a continuation of a previous post found here. Changes Dave believes are coming with respect to agile-run projects and my own commentary on these: Requirements engineers make decisions, they are not just documenters. Expect to see that product owners are the BAs. They will less often be...

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I attended a keynote at RE’09 in Atlanta that I wanted to go back and post a summary of and my thoughts on. And just to be completely honest, this is a rarity. For whatever reason, I really tend not to get much value out of keynote talks – either...

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I attended a talk by folks from BluePrint and Lexis Nexis at BAWorld on Tuesday at BAWorld: Boston called "Requirements Definition for Agile Projects". The first bit of the talk was just an intro to agile and why it is useful on the projects. The part that I found most...

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I attended a talk by folks from BluePrint and LexisNexis at BAWorld on Tuesday. The first bit of the talk was just an intro to agile and why it is useful on the projects. The part that I found most interesting was from someone who owned business analysis on lawyers.com...

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As part of our Live from BAWorld: Boston series, I just heard a talk from Karen McKay at Doreen Evans Associates (DEA). She discussed building a BA competency in your organization. Her talk was focused on the high-level need for such a model and what the components of it are....

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As part of my "Live from BAWorld: Boston" series, I attended a talk Monday by Matthew Leach of Doreen Evan Associates called "Leveraging Multi-Level Use Cases for Testing and Other Ways to Obtain Greater ROI on your Business Analysis Investment". His talk went into great depth about how you could...

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Also at BAWorld: Boston, Monday I heard Barbara Carkenoard talk about "ROI? Measuring the Real Value of Business Analysis" and her learning objectives were:Learn to talk about the specific value of a strong business analysis disciplineConsider business analysis metrics for use in your organizationUnderstand why a financial ROI is not...

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This week I find myself at Project Summit & BAWorld: Boston for about a day and a half. This morning I presented our talk, "If you Build It, Will They Use It? Leveraging Business Objectives to Deliver Successful Projects". One thing I like about the BAWorld symposiums is that they...

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I am going to take it a little off the beaten path for this post and ask about some 'non-functional' work requirements you have. So I was wondering what you all like to do when you have to stay focused? Do you listen to classical? Work remotely from a...

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