Toluu

Tyner Blain

Software product success.

Verifiable RequirementsAugust 30

Writing Verifiable Requirements should be a rule that does not need to be written.  Everyone reading this has seen or created requirements that can not be verified.  The primary reason for writing requirements is to communicate to the team what they need to accomplish.  If you can’t verify that what the team delivered is acceptable, neither can the team.  This may be the most obvious of the rules of writing requirements – but it is ignored every day.

Verifiable Requirements – Revisiting

In 2006, I first looked at how and why writing verifiable requirements is important - as part of the ongoing series on the rules of writing good requirements.  The focus of that article was on testability, as is this one.  When visiting verifiability again, however, I will add that not only must specifications be objectively measurable, but so mu

Foundation Series: Inside A Scrum SprintAugust 25

People who already use Scrum will only find one new thing in this article – a way to communicate what happens inside a sprint that has proven effective for me.  People who are new to Scrum who wonder “how do things work inside a sprint?” will see how things work in a way that avoids hyperbole and is easy to map to what they already understand from traditional software development processes.

Two Teams Separated by a Common Process

George Bernard Shaw was an Irish author in London who memorably said “England and America are two countries separated by a common language.”  The same can be said about teams developing in agile and waterfall processes.

The story of agile adoption is one that has many colorful examples of adoption and of spreading the gospel.  Some practitioners traveled across the ocean from the agile continent to the lands of agile and opportunity to reap the rewards.  A few o

Writing Unambiguous RequirementsAugust 18

Writing unambiguous requirements is about understanding what is written, and what is read.  Without a clear understanding of your market, you can’t write unambiguously.  Even when you understand your market, you risk writing something that is ambiguous to your readers.  Documenting requirements is about communication.  Don’t break this rule, or you’ve wasted all the energy you spent understanding your requirements.

Unambiguous Requirements – Revisiting

Fifty months and five days ago (another grin), I wrote about the importance of writing requirements so that they can be clearly understood.  Writing requirements so that there is one, unambiguous, interpretation of what you wrote.  This article is the seventh in a series on the rules of writing good requirements.  In that version of the article, I focused primarily on language ambiguity, and framed the discussion in terms of ambiguity to the writer and to the reader.

As part of improving that series, I am revisiting each of the articles n

Innovation and TransparencyJuly 27

Accept has invited me to participate in their webinar series on Transparency and Innovation – this Wednesday, July 28, 2010 (10AM Pacific, 1PM Eastern).

Join us and join in!

The Importance of Innovation and Transparency

Cool, huh? :)

Accept is hosting a free 5-part series on transparency, and has invited me to be one of their speakers.

The other speakers are rock stars – Nils Davis & Alex Lobba [replay available], Tom Grant, Roy Wildeman, and Brian Lawley.

Each of us will be looking at the importance of innovation and transparency from a different perspective.  Combine that with encouraged audience participation, and we should really be able to tease out some powerful ideas!

Rupert Murdoch – Zero; John Nash – OneJuly 20

vs.

What happens when billionaire media magnate, Rupert Murdoch, pits his idea against a Nobel-prize winning idea from the beautiful mind of economist and mathematician John Nash?

When you act on what you hope your market will do, instead of what you predict your market will do – you’re in trouble.

This is a story about understanding your market, and an example of using game theory – specifically, the Nash Equilibrium in “non-cooperative game theory” to predict market responses to your products.

Murdoch’s Idea

To sum up the particular idea I’m talking about – Mr. Murdoch has put the Times of London behind a pay-wall (you have to subscribe to access the content online), and removed the articles from Google’s search index.  He did this because