January 5, 2010 – 9:28 am –
2009 was a tough year in many ways. If you were not personally impacted by losing your job or being furloughed, you most likely knew one or more close family and friends that were impacted.
April 14, 2009 – 3:10 pm –
As I hear more and more BAs talking about user stories I feel the need to begin a dialogue on our blog. User stories have been promoted by the iterative and agile software development approaches as a quick way to elicit and document user requirements. Some BAs are being told that user stories are the [...]
February 17, 2009 – 2:16 pm –
Many analysts skip the identification of business processes and move right to the Use Cases. Some call these “Business Use Cases” and view them as logical, business requirements. I recommend that both business processes and system Use Cases are important components. They are two different requirement constructs representing two different perspectives with two different purposes.
Business [...]
December 30, 2008 – 4:05 pm –
I just read a very good blog by Alistair Cockburn that summarizes the challenges in agile development when substituting user stories for use cases as the primary functional requirements deliverable. I love it when he says a user story is similar to a use case like a gazelle is to a gazebo. Pretty funny. I highly [...]
November 17, 2008 – 9:24 am –
Most BAs don't have access to sophisticated requirements management tools. We are keeping our requirements in MS office documents. I am interested in where you are storing all of these documents. Sharepoint? Documentum? How are these repositories working? At the World Congress for Business Analysis conference this week in Orlando I will moderating a discussion [...]
October 28, 2008 – 9:10 am –
Angie Perris is attending the Business Rules Forum in Orlando, FL this week and is blogging about the sessions she is attending. Here is her update from Day 1.
Day 1 - Pre Conference workshop – Sunday 10/26/08
I was thrilled to attend a Business Rules seminar by Ronald Ross who is often called the "father of business [...]
August 20, 2008 – 9:54 am –
As the business analysis profession evolves we will get more consistency around our terminology. One of the phrases that is still used inconsistently is requirements management. Most experienced BAs use the phrase "requirements management" to mean the activity of "managing" the requirements. This includes tasks like deciding where requirements will be stored, how they will [...]
June 4, 2008 – 6:04 am –
Gap analysis is a well established technique for business analysts working on COTS (Commercial off-the-shelf) package implementations. It is amazing that this simple technique can be helpful with so many analysis challenges. Most gap analysis is done in a matrix or table where the analyst can keep track of the business needs in one column and note [...]
April 14, 2008 – 9:00 am –
Hear me out! I go to my gym to workout at least 3 times a week. I go at different times each visit so I do not have the pleasure of getting to know the staff that well because of the changing shifts. Each time I go to pick up my membership card when getting ready to [...]
April 7, 2008 – 9:00 am –
Recently I participated in an interesting discussion about software development projects. There was an underlying assumption by some that using a consistent software development life cycle (SDLC) on all projects is a good thing and someone asked how to best enforce it. For me, enforcement is a morale killer. In working with many companies over [...]
