Features vs. Use Cases vs. Requirements

June 13, 2012 By

In other news, here’s a question I often get:

Hey Michael, What is the difference between:

  • Features
  • Use Cases, and
  • Requirements?

Here’s my answer. Disclaimer: This is not a universally accepted answer, and you may find other answers on the internet that directly contradict mine. But that’s totally fine, as you and I know they’re all wrong and I’m correct – Yes?!

Onto the answer…

Feature vs. Use Case vs. Requirement

You see, it all starts with user needs. After all, the goal of building (or enhancing) a product is to meet the needs of our users.

  • The other goal is to impress our boss’ Portugese water dog – but that is the subject of another post, on my secret blog! 😉

[Read more…]

Filed Under: Requirements Management Basics, Use Cases

What is a Requirements Management Plan?

May 9, 2012 By

In this quick post, I’d like to define the term “Requirements Management Plan”.

Simply put, “Requirements Management Plan” refers to:

A document (or set of documents) that define how the requirements for a software project will be managed.

Requirement management plan outlines the guidelines for creating requirements documents, types and attributes of requirements to be included in such documents, as well as the processes for change control and requirements traceability.

Here’s some more info about requirements management plans.

[Read more…]

Filed Under: Requirements Documents, Requirements Management Basics

Types of Software Requirements

April 6, 2012 By

In my last two posts I covered What are software requirements and the Why and who of requirements.

Did you know there are many different types of software requirements? Okay, you probably did! In this post, I’ll walk you through the most common types of software requirements.

Ready to get rolling? [Read more…]

Filed Under: Requirements Management Basics, Use Cases

Software Requirements: Why and Who?

April 6, 2012 By

In my last post, I covered the definition of requirements – i.e. the What. We also briefly touched upon why requirements are important.

In this post, I’ll dive deeper into the Why and Who of requirements. That is:

  • Why are requirements important?
  • Who uses requirements?

Let’s get started, shall we? [Read more…]

Filed Under: Requirements Management Basics

What Exactly is a “Requirement” Anyhow?

April 5, 2012 By

Hi there! This is our first post in this blog. We’ll start with the basics – a definition of the term Requirements. We had previously defined it in our other blog, and we’ll recap it here.

Before we dive into our definition of this term, let’s take a look at how a couple of popular authors define it.

Karl Wiegers, in his popular book Software Requirements defines requirement as follows: [Read more…]

Filed Under: Requirements Management Basics