Agile Software Requirements: Lean Requirements Practices for Teams, Programs, and the Enterprise

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Addison-Wesley Professional, Dec 27, 2010 - Computers - 560 pages

“We need better approaches to understanding and managing software requirements, and Dean provides them in this book. He draws ideas from three very useful intellectual pools: classical management practices, Agile methods, and lean product development. By combining the strengths of these three approaches, he has produced something that works better than any one in isolation.”

–From the Foreword by Don Reinertsen, President of Reinertsen & Associates; author of Managing the Design Factory; and leading expert on rapid product development

Effective requirements discovery and analysis is a critical best practice for serious application development. Until now, however, requirements and Agile methods have rarely coexisted peacefully. For many enterprises considering Agile approaches, the absence of effective and scalable Agile requirements processes has been a showstopper for Agile adoption. In Agile Software Requirements, Dean Leffingwell shows exactly how to create effective requirements in Agile environments.

  • Part I presents the “big picture” of Agile requirements in the enterprise, and describes an overall process model for Agile requirements at the project team, program, and portfolio levels
  • Part II describes a simple and lightweight, yet comprehensive model that Agile project teams can use to manage requirements
  • Part III shows how to develop Agile requirements for complex systems that require the cooperation of multiple teams
  • Part IV guides enterprises in developing Agile requirements for ever-larger “systems of systems,” application suites, and product portfolios

This book will help you leverage the benefits of Agile without sacrificing the value of effective requirements discovery and analysis. You’ll find proven solutions you can apply right now–whether you’re a software developer or tester, executive, project/program manager, architect, or team leader.

 

Contents

Foreword
Acknowledgments
The Big Picture
Different
Summary
Agile Requirements for the Team
Summary
Testing Nonfunctional Requirements
Distributed Estimating with Online Planning
Retrospective
Decreasing Your Teams Agility?
Queue Length
Role of the Product Owner
Product Manager
Owners Product Owner Proxies Product Owner Teams
Summary

Agile Requirements for the Portfolio
Project
Tendril Platform
Agile Requirements for the Team
Technical Spikes and Functional Spikes
Stakeholders User Personas and User
Identifying Stakeholders
Agile Estimating and Velocity
Planning Poker
Brainstorming
Agile Requirements for the Program
Iterating Backlog Throughput and Kanban
New Features Build the Program Backlog
Role of the Product Manager
PreAgile Enterprise
Release Objectives
Release Planning
Copyright

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About the author (2010)

Dean Leffingwell, a thirty-year software industry veteran, has spent his career helping software teams achieve their goals. A renowned methodologist, author, coach, entrepreneur, and executive, he founded Requisite, Inc., makers of RequisitePro, and served as its CEO. As vice president at Rational Software (now part of IBM), he led the commercialization of the Rational Unified Process. As an independent consultant and as an advisor to Rally Software, he has helped entrepreneurial teams and large, distributed, multinational corporations implement Agile methods at scale. He is the author of Scaling Software Agility: Best Practices for Large Enterprises (Addison-Wesley, 2007) and is the lead author of Managing Software Requirements, Second Edition (Addison-Wesley, 2003), which has been translated into five languages.

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