Entries for 'admin'

RUP describes a process for developing software systems. It seems there are so many variations of RUP, how do you know which is best for you and your organization, if any? What do all those acronyms mean? Where are these things coming from?

Author: Geri Schneider Winters

Some of you may be working on systems with many complex relationships between the parts. These complex systems may be described as a system of systems, or may be described as a product line, or perhaps both at once.

In these cases, you will often find that the requirements of a large, overall system are shared among a number of related projects, each of which implements some well-defined part of the overall system.

Author: Geri Schneider Winters

Geri Schneider Winters writes about whether or not you could write alternatives to alternatives in use cases.

There is no actual standard for the formatting of a use case specification, just guidelines and best practices.  Therefore, if using alternatives to alternatives in use cases makes the use case more clear - use it, by any means.

Author: Geri Schneider Winters

In this article, Geri Schneider Winters discusses the question of whether use cases can be used to document requirements for reports.

Author: Geri Schneider Winters

When it comes to providing reliable, flexible and efficient object persistence for software systems, today's designers and architects are faced with many choices. From the technological perspective, the choice is usually between pure Object-Oriented, Object-Relational hybrids, pure Relational and custom solutions based on open or proprietary file f...

The talents, competencies and heroics of project managers and technologists alone cannot drive value into the organization. For business needs and goals to be converted into innovative solutions that truly bring wealth to the enterprise, a stronger bridge must be built between the business and the technical communities. Enter the business analyst. ...

This article provides a high level description of the job of the Business Analyst as well as summary answers on questions such as "Why you need a business analyst?", "What are the desired skills for a business analyst?", "How to find business analysts?", etc. Author: Katherine Walsh

Many organizations are scratching their collective heads over how to build and mature a business analysis center of excellence (COE). Where do we start? What does a business analysis center of excellence look like? Who owns it? How does it evolve? This white paper outlines the standard operating practices necessary for a business analysis center o...

Traditional software development has always required a long requirements-gathering phase at the beginning of a project that, if not handled correctly, can often result in schedule delays and costly budget overruns that have a significant impact on the project itself.  Software simulation can streamline that process and prevent many of the erro...

Maybe it was that southern drawl. Or maybe it was because I got mad. I'm not sure why I still remember this moment so clearly, but I do.  It happened when I was at Spyglass, over ten years ago.  Several of us developers were in a meeting with Steve Stone, then recently-hired as director of the Champaign office.  We were talking abo...

The Use Case Model describes the proposed functionality of the new system. A Use Case represents a discrete unit of interaction between a user (human or machine) and the system. A Use Case is a single unit of meaningful work; for example login to system, register with system and create order are all Use Cases. Each Use Case has a description which ...

In this fourth and final part of the series I'll share some of my advice for writing good specs. The biggest complaint you'll hear from teams that do write specs is that "nobody reads them." When nobody reads specs, the people who write them tend to get a little bit cynical. It's like the old Dilbert cartoon in which engineers use stacks of 4-inc...

Now that you've read all about why you need a spec and what a spec has in it, let's talk about who should write them. Who writes specs? Let me give you a little Microsoft history here. When Microsoft started growing seriously in the 1980s, everybody there had read The Mythical Man-Month, one of the classics of software management. (If you haven'...

This series of articles is about functional specifications, not technical specifications. People get these mixed up. I don't know if there's any standard terminology, but here's what I mean when I use these terms. A functional specification describes how a product will work entirely from the user's perspective. It doesn't care how the thing is i...

It seems that specs are like flossing: everybody knows they should be writing them, but nobody does. Why won't people write specs? People claim that it's because they're saving time by skipping the spec-writing phase. They act as if spec-writing was a luxury reserved for NASA space shuttle engineers, or people who work for giant, established insu...