Requirements, the Agile Way

  Agile   Requirements Management   ProjectsAtWork  

While requirements discovery and analysis is a critical best practice for application development, requirements and Agile methods have rarely meshed. In a new book, Dean Leffingwell shows how to leverage the benefits of Agile without sacrificing the value of effective requirements.

This is the Foreword to “Agile Software Requirements: Lean Requirements Practices for Teams, Programs, and the Enterprise” by Dean Leffingwell (Pearson/Addison-Wesley Professional; ISBN 0321635841, Dec. 2010). For more information: www.informit.com/title/0321635841.

Why do product development projects miss their economic objectives? Studies show that 80 to 85 percent of project failures are due to incorrect requirements. Experienced developers know that managing requirements is a greater challenge than technical execution. And, although we have known this for decades, we really haven’t gotten much better at it. Why? At first, we were functionally organized, so we simply displaced the problem outside the boundary of engineering — we blamed marketing and product management. Later, as we adopted cross-functional teams, we told these teams to listen to the voice of the customer and assumed that this would solve the problem.

It didn’t. We never challenged the idea that it was feasible to develop valid requirements up front — we just told people to try harder…

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