While Agile has been gaining more and more ground, it appears that many organizations are also adopting their own flavor of Agile. They take the parts that they like or work for them and integrate them into their own process. Sometimes this is driven by outside factors, like compliance needs and customers.
In these instances, you may have a need to manage both requirements and user stories in the same project. In this post, I’ll talk about one way to do this in TestTrack.
Peter and Mike discuss several aspects of requirements management, and why traceability is so important to the software development process these days. Following are a few interesting nuggets, if you don’t have time to listen to the 46-minute interview:
01:30 - Definition of requirements traceability
09:50 - How to make traceability automatic
21:55 - How to know if your traceability strategy measures up
Thanks to everyone who joined us for our When Requirements Change: Continuing to Meet User Expectations with Requirements Traceability webinar. The recording is now available on YouTube if you missed the webinar or want to watch it again. Following is the SlideShare version of the webinar.
Unlike a wildebeest, your products are unlikely to thrive in the middle of the herd right now. In challenging economic times, your customers start focusing on value and you need to separate yourself from the herd. I was reminded of this earlier in the week while listening to Activision Publishing’s CEO discuss the gaming market. In responding to a question about current challenges in the gaming industry, Eric Hirshberg had this to say (paraphrasing):
It’s really the best of times and the worst of times for the gaming industry. The top 10 titles are bigger than ever and growing, the part of the industry that is struggling is the “middle class of title.” The middle-budget and middle-rating games aren’t seeing as much interest as they did just a few years ago … There’s no way to market yourself out of a mediocre game.
His point was that quality is the key imperative to a title’s success, and that’s something we’re seeing in every industry right now. The products that best meet users’ needs—and do so reliably—are the products that win in this market.
It used to be that users, or product management, submitted a set of features and requirements to the development team and waited patiently while development constructed exactly what they asked for. Six months later, when users saw this new application for the first time, they realized that what they asked for wasn’t really what they needed. Something had been lost in the translation from what they needed to what they told development to create, to what development ultimately created. “No problem,” development would say when told the existing software didn’t meet a specific need, “we can change that in the next release.” And six months later, it would indeed be changed!
Make plans to join us when the Seapine ALM Tour 2010 stops in Huntsville, Alabama on September 23. Meet some of our product management team, see the upcoming Seapine ALM 2011 release, and learn ways to boost agility, collaboration, and traceability! It’s all free!
We recently released version 2010.1 of TestTrack, which contains many new exciting new features. One new feature that I would like to give some love to is Item Mapping Rules. This feature will benefit users who have more than one TestTrack applications, as it allows you to configure how field values are mapped from one application to another.
Do you commonly write test cases for project requirements only to find out that you were looking at the requirement from last week and now the edit boxes are drop-downs and the radio buttons were turned into check boxes? So you have to go back and re-work the test but of course time isn’t in the schedule so you’re spending your evenings updating stale test cases. This huge headache is caused by a simple lack of communication. If someone had told you the requirements changed, you could have easily tracked down the latest copy and avoided the re-work.
Since the introduction of TestTrack RM earlier this year, I’ve had a chance to demonstrate the product many times to prospects. While the initial feature set of the product is impressive, every once in a while I do hear about features that are not currently available. These become feature requests, which are prioritized and scoped out by our product management team.
One feature request I have heard a few times is for a very specific need. This scenario is for a user whose only action related to requirements is to approve or reject them. This user is not in development, QA, or any other group directly involved with software development and does not use TestTrack. This individual is likely to only deal with business requirements and not functional requirements. The user does not want to install the TestTrack client and learn how to use it when only a simple view is needed to review and approve or reject requirements.
Unlike a wildebeest, your products are unlikely to thrive in the middle of the herd right now. In challenging economic times, your customers start focusing on value and you need to separate yourself from the herd. I was reminded of this earlier in the week while 
