Estimation is a chronically thorny issue for software practitioners. Most people need to prepare estimates for the work they do, but in our industry we don’t do a great job of estimation. In this article I offer six safety tips to keep in mind as you prepare estimates for your project and for your individual work... These six safety tips might not help you create estimates that all of your customers, managers, and coworkers will dance to, but at least they will help you and your team hear the same music.

The ethics behind accessibility is possibly not something you have considered before. I think many would categorise an accessibility tool as something that; ‘makes life easier’, for a disabled user. However, what we should be taking into account when designing new digital platforms is how to make sure that every single user has the same experience. This is actually a very key point as we are not even specifically talking about disabilities here.

Have you considered mobile users vs web? IOS vs Windows? Online vs Offline? These are all possible different users of your system and all deserve the same experience. It may well be that a lot of these points are non-functional requirements that come later in the development, but if you make sure you are considering them at the start, you can save yourself a lot of time and effort in the future.

The previous article in this series discussed ensuring that high-level requirements (HLRs), within the context of an IT-based project, were properly high level. The remainder of articles in the series will look at detail requirements and the need for them to be sufficiently detailed. The objective of this article is to demonstrate how a data dictionary (DD) can be used as a tool for capturing the appropriate level of detail representing data-specific business needs.

The purpose of the Trips-R-You Flight Booking Case Study is to provide an integrated, end-to-end set of requirement examples. In IIBA® BABOK® V3 terminology, end-to-end means from Business Requirements to Stakeholder Requirements to Solution and Transition Requirements. This case study, and associated artefacts, use the more traditional business terms Goals, High-level Requirements (HLRs), and Detail Requirements. Only functional requirements are addressed, and only within the context of a project chartered to deliver an IT-based solution.

Let us look at it from a different angle now and derive the requirements out of the customer journeys.  It is impossible to introduce a change... if the change is big and you try to implement it in one go.  This is the reason we tend to break any solution into smaller components. Each solution component should be small and independent enough to be changed individually in a controlled manner. So that eventually we will compose a new experience out of them. Pretty much like using a set of Lego blocks.

The question of how essential domain expertise is to a business analyst is a recurring debate in the BA community. One school of thought maintains that domain knowledge is not critical. A skilled BA, the thinking goes, can walk into nearly any project situation and do an effective job of exploring requirements, relying on previous experience and a rich tool kit of requirements techniques. The counterargument avers that an analyst who has deep subject matter knowledge can be far more effective than a more general practitioner.

I have experienced both situations, from inside a company as a regular employee and from the outside as a consultant. This article offers some thoughts about when domain knowledge is valuable, when it’s essential, when it’s not necessary, and when it can actually pose a risk.

Successful projects—and successful relationships—are based on realistic commitments, not on fantasies and empty promises. This article, adapted from the book Practical Project Initiation, presents several ways to improve your ability to make, and keep, achievable commitments... Unfulfilled promises ultimately lead to unhappy people and unsuccessful projects. Strive to build a realistic commitment ethic in your team—and in yourself.

If someone said you could only perform a single quality practice on a software project, what would you choose? I’d pick peer reviews of requirements, which I believe are the highest-leverage quality practice we have available today.  In a peer review, someone other than the author of a work product examines the product for quality problems and improvement opportunities. Reviewing requirements is a powerful technique. Use them to identify ambiguous or unverifiable requirements, find requirements that aren’t sufficiently detailed yet, spot conflicts between requirements, and reveal numerous other problems.

The fact that software projects and tasks are reported to be “90 percent done” for a long time has become something of an industry joke. (A related joke states that the first half of a software project consumes the first 90 percent of the resources, and the second half consumes the other 90 percent of the resources.) This well-intentioned but misleading status tracking makes it difficult to judge when a body of work will truly be completed so you can ship the next product release to your customers. Here are several typical causes of “90 percent done” syndrome and a few possible cures.