Practical Requirements Management
A Blog - Practical Tips & Articles on Requirements Management. No Highfalutin Theories!
I'm your author, Michael Shrivathsan, an expert in requirements management with successful experience at several innovative companies in Silicon Valley, USA over the past two decades. I'm also a USPTO patent recipient. For my day job, I'm the VP of Product Management at Accompa, we make the popular requirements management software.
In my last blog post, I discussed why the User Interface (UI) specifications should be an integral part of requirements.
If you agree (fully or partially) with my take on this, the next question to consider is as follows: At what stage of the requirements management process should we write the UI specifications?
My answer for this is surprisingly simple, yet difficult to implement in most projects. But that is not bad news.
What is the answer, and why is it not bad news? Read on…
[Read more…]
Since the advent of the software industry, User Interface (UI) has been an afterthought – for the most part. UI is something the teams building the software slapped on the software at the end of a project.
Kinda like a coat of paint after the house was built! 🙂
The conventional wisdom (especially in B2B software) was that customers did not buy the software for the UI, they bought it for the functionality.
From this piece of conventional wisdom, another one followed: UI should *NOT* be a part of requirements. Rather, UI is something added after the requirements (use cases or functional requirements) were defined.
Is this still true? Read on for the answer… [Read more…]
As you know, writing detailed requirements is very valuable – both for traditional (waterfall) projects, and for Agile projects. Please check out my previous post for why detailed requirements are beneficial even for Agile projects.
In this blog post, I’d like to highlight one thing that many people miss when it comes to requirements management.
Wondering what it is? Read on for the answer… [Read more…]
A question I hear often nowadays is:
Our development team has switched to Agile/Scrum. Are detailed requirements really needed when following an Agile process?
This is a somewhat controversial question, as some Agile development teams seem to think detailed requirements are *evil*. I’m only slightly exaggerating!
However, for software of any complexity, most companies I’ve spoken with find it nearly impossible to build the software using just user stories on index cards.
The best answer to this question perhaps comes from Mike Cohn, one of the best-known proponents of Agile and the author of the popular book User Stories Applied: For Agile Software Development. Cohn has said [Read more…]
I made a post about a year ago on our Product Management Insights blog saying that Accompa works well on Macs.
Just cross-posting it on this blog too, as we’ve some received some inquiries from readers of this blog about whether our Accompa Requirements Management Software works well on Macs.
Just to reiterate the other post’s message: I’m a Mac user myself, and I’m happy to let you know Accompa is 100% compatible with Mac! 🙂
This is because Accompa is not only 100% cloud-based, it is also 100% based on HTML and related standards. And, it is *NOT* dependent on 3rd party plugins like Flash, Java, etc. Nor is it dependent on features specific to Internet Explorer or Chrome – like some apps these days.
This means, our requirements management software is fully (as in 100%) functional on Mac – and works on all major browsers: Firefox (my favorite browser), Chrome, and Safari.
So, if your team needs a requirements software and has people who use a Mac, Accompa may be a good fit. Of course, Accompa also works well on Windows, on all major browsers: Firefox, Chrome, and Internet Explorer. If you’d like to find out whether Accompa can help your team – check out our product tour or request free trial.
Editor’s Note:
Interested in an affordable, enterprise-quality software to help you manage requirements in a better way? Check out FREE 30-Day trial of Accompa or Sign Up for a Demo.
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