Tag: Agile

What do BAs “Do” within Agile Teams?

Written by Robert Galen on November 10, 2009. Posted in Articles.

For the past several posts, I’ve been focusing on user stories within the context of agile teams-how to write them and the role they play in agile development. This month I wanted to switch gears a bit and talk about the role of the BA within agile teams.

The first point I really want to make is not BA role specific but focused towards the general role of the agile team member. You see roles need to become much less clear or constrained within agile teams. Sure, a developer is still a technical role and will be mostly writing code, but that doesn’t mean it’s the only thing they can and should be contributing to the team.

There’s quite a debate in the agile community about generalists vs. specialists as team members. Clearly the more general you are, for example a tester who can write or read code or a BA who can test, the more flexible your contributions are within the agile team.

The pushback within the community is based on folks taking this idea to its (unintended) extreme, for example developers who believe we’re asking them to morph into full-time testers or vice versa. So, in general, pun intended, you should not view yourself narrowly as a business analyst, but more broadly as a team member who has strong requirement analysis skills against an even broader back-drop of capabilities that you often bring to bear within your team.

So, what specifically is the BA role within agility?

It starts out the same as it does in your existing role. You are a customer advocate and liaison. You have tremendous experience in the analysis and capture of critical system requirements. You have broad collaborative and observational skills. Often, you sit down with a wide variety customers, stakeholders, and constituents and gather and define requirements from a wide variety of angles.

But within agility there is so much more you can do along the lines of the following:

Product Backlog Partner. Clearly the BA role focuses on requirement definition & refinement. Using Scrum as our terminology backdrop, it implies working closely with your product owner, customers, and team members to construct and refine the backlog. Remember, in the agile methods all work should be defined on the backlog, so it’s not simply feature-based. You need to be comfortable defining user stories that represent task work as well.
Fostering Team Collaboration. BAs often become a liaison between the product owner (customer) and the team. They foster an inclusive view that brings team members together to better design and build customer-focused solutions. The methods sort of oversell collaboration as a natural occurrence. I have the view that it needs to be encouraged and often championed. BAs can clearly serve as this champion of collaboration amongst team members. I’ve often seen BAs adopt a facilitative role within their teams, facilitating effective meetings, information sharing, and problem solving.
Driving Quality. Working with your product owner and testers, you help to define, refine, and even execute user story-centric acceptance tests. Often, you’ll view the execution of features from a more holistic, end-to-end usability view that is so important to the customer. Verifying that the software is as simple as possible while still meeting the customer’s usability and core expectations.
Maintaining a Value Focus. Taking a page from Lean Thinking, the agile methods are extremely value and cost centric. Often you’ll see Scrum teams that focus not only on priority to determine what is worked on first, but they also try and determine the value (ROI) for a given feature set. BAs can often help facilitate this value-based analysis between team and customer. They can also help guide the team towards Minimal Marketable Feature sets (MMFs) that implement predetermined value, delivering early and often.
Demonstrating Results. As a full-time member of your agile team, your true focus is towards delivering small slices of end-to-end functionality at the end of each sprint. Be willing to serve as a voice of your team in these demonstrations. Truly understand how the delivered software works and how to effectively demonstrate its value. Don’t be afraid to step into the limelight and demonstrate working code as part of each sprint review.

Often I think of the US Army recruitment commercial, “Be All You Can Be”, when I think of roles with agile teams. As an Agile BA, you should grow your skills horizontally and fearlessly contribute wherever you can within the team. Your teams and customers will value you for it!

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Robert ‘Bob’ Galen is the President and Principal Consultant of RGCG, L.L.C. Bob has held director, manager and contributor level positions in both software development and quality assurance organizations. He has over 25 years of experience working across a wide variety of software technology and product domains. Bob can be reached at [email protected].

Slaying the Dragon: Oldies but Goodies in an Agile World

Written by Elizabeth Larson on October 27, 2009. Posted in Articles.

Attending the PMI Global Congress a couple of weeks ago reminded me that good ideas have staying power. There were several presentations on managing agile projects. As I listened, I was reminded of some of my past projects. Here are a few principles that have always worked for me and that can apply to agile projects.

Divide and Conquer

When I was first promoted to project manager, I was given a large new project to tackle. One of my colleagues told me that he was glad I was assigned the project. He said that he dreaded hearing of a new initiative, because he imagined a large dragon with its head peeking around the cubicle wall. I loved being a dragon slayer. I took that fire-breathing beast and cut it into several pieces, which we prioritized and completed more or less successfully. The “less” had more to do with not getting input from enough business subject matter experts, but the principle of breaking a large project into smaller chunks worked wonderfully.

The Project Management “what” vs. “how”

Deliverables have always counted more on my projects than activities and tasks. Deliverables focus on what needs to be done. Tasks provide actions – how each deliverable will be produced. In his Global Congress presentation, Why Agile Focuses on the Work-Breakdown-Structure and Frequent Communications, Clement J Goebel described the application of the Work Breakdown Structure (WBS) to the agile environment. I continue to believe that the deliverable WBS is one of the most useful concepts in the PMBOK, and I was delighted to hear how it applies to agile projects. As a project manager, I was the only one I knew who never used a Gantt chart. Sure I had activity lists, but each task was tied to a deliverable. A feature if you will.

Whose Project is it, anyhow?

I learned early in my project management career that trying to control scope was a losing battle – one I fought courageously, but never won. I learned that requirements, the basis of the project scope, needed to be prioritized by the business, not by me. On some agile projects features are prioritized by the role of the product owner, or business representative, not the acting project manager.

The Three “I’s.”

In the mid-90s I worked on a large project, one of the organization’s early “RAD” projects. RAD stood for Rapid Application Design/Development. We were trained by a consultant, who taught us the principle of the Three-I’s” – Iteration, Increment, and Involvement. We learned to do iterations, focusing on prototyping as a way to drive out requirements, although in all honesty, our iterations were more of a hybrid approach than is used today. The increments were time boxes. Again, our time boxes were longer and looser than those today, but they certainly helped.

Perhaps the most important of the “I’s” was Involvement. We were fortunate, indeed, to have a full-time business expert move from her office in the merchandising department, where she was one of hundreds of buyers, to our IS area where our team was co-located. Her presence was invaluable to the project. Today we would probably call her the product owner, but we called her a BUC– Business User Coordinator. She facilitated the requirements workshops, prototyping sessions, and user acceptance testing. As code was developed, she brought other client representatives into our area to show them prototypes and ensure they were on board with the new system. She participated in sponsor meetings, particularly when there was conflict between SMEs.

Our BUC worked in true partnership with the business analyst who ensured that the requirements were clear, that dependencies were taken into account, and that the design, code, and testing addressed the approved requirements. She also helped ensure that the interfacing systems and programs were completed, since there were many hundreds of programs that needed to be changed to accommodate the new system. There was virtually no conflict between these two roles. The term “collaborate” was not in our vernacular, but that’s exactly what they did.

Although the project was considered highly successful, one of the main missing ingredients had to do with me, the project manager. In retrospect, I should have spent more of my time removing obstacles (of which there were massive numbers) and let the team figure out how to get the project done. I should have worked for the team, instead of viewing the team as working for me.

Final thought. It seems to me that agile was built on some pretty solid principles, but these have been taken to a whole new level, vastly improving the software development process.

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Elizabeth Larson, PMP, CBAP, CEO and Co-Principal of Watermark Learning (www.watermarklearning.com) has over 25 years of experience in business, project management, requirements analysis, business analysis and leadership. She has presented workshops, seminars, and presentations since 1996 to thousands of participants on three different continents. Elizabeth’s speaking history includes, PMI North American, EMEA, and Asia-Pacific Global Congresses, various chapters of PMI, and ProjectWorld and Business Analyst World. Elizabeth was the lead contributor to the PMBOK® Guide – Fourth Edition in the new Collect Requirements Section 5.1 and to the BABOK® Guide – 2.0 Chapter on Business Analysis Planning and Monitoring. Elizabeth has co-authored the CBAP Certification Study Guide and the Practitioner’s Guide to Requirements Planning, as well as industry articles that have been published worldwide. She can be reached at [email protected].

User Stories – Large Misconceptions. Part 1.

Written by Robert Galen on September 15, 2009. Posted in Articles.

One of the larger misconceptions associated with user stories is that they are static; defined once and then never touched again. Another misconception is that they stand-alone as a requirement artifact. Another is that only a customer surrogate or product owner can write them. And finally, many miss the power of the acceptance tests as a clarifying vehicle for the story.

Over my next two posts, I want to address each of these in turn. Not only should these approaches help your user story writing, but your general requirements definition clarity and understanding should improve as well. And these misconceptions also assist distributed, non-local teams in eliciting stories that are more meaningful where they struggle to maintain active face-to-face communication.

User Stories are Organic!

If you study Scrum and product backlogs at all, you’ll realize that the backlog list of user stories evolves quite dynamically over time. Usually stories are created in a Story Writing Workshop at the beginning of a project effort. In this case the stories are often ill-defined and quite large-epics or even larger.

Coming out of the workshop, there is a tremendous amount of work to do on refining the stories, but certainly not all at once. The metaphor to keep in the back of your mind is – Tip of the Iceberg! You only need to refine the stories that are 1-2-3 or so iterations (Sprints) away from actual execution.

As you move forward, delivering those pre-defined stories, you actively groom the stories moving up on the backlog-getting them prepared for execution. Typically teams groom their product backlogs weekly. The process serves to refine the clarity surrounding each story. Often it will lead to other stories-breaking them into more meaningful units and discussing dependencies. Themes or packages of stories will emerge as well, as the product owner and team think about how best to couple stories into meaningful chunks for delivery.

The last and probably most important part of the dynamic is that the team factors in ongoing progress (execution velocity) and learning into their grooming.

While working with remote or distributed agile teams, it’s important to participate in these grooming sessions as a team. In this way, everyone is involved in the real-time conversations that are naturally part of backlog evolution.

User Stories are not a Catch-All Artifact!

The key driver for the content of requirements within agile team is the team itself. Let’s say a team member encounters a user story in a backlog grooming session that is simply too ill-defined to understand or estimate. However, they do understand the story well enough to suggest that-if they had a use case with it, one that was designed like one they’ve used/encountered before, they would have sufficient clarity to proceed.

In this case, they’re suggesting supplementing the Story with a known additional artifact form.

This is great!

Instead of trying to embellish the story as-is, simply link it to the newly created use case. In fact, it’s perfectly acceptable to link stories to all sorts of well known or used artifacts in your organization – traditional requirement (SRS) specifications, forms or templates, traditional use cases, agile use cases, wireframes, etc. All can effectively come into play to enhance and supplement your understanding of individual stories.

The caveat is that you don’t want to do this for every story. Let the individual cases or needs emerge from the team! Don’t create them too far in advance and certainly don’t create all user stories with the same level of detail. These extensions must come as requests from the team, i.e., they’re pulled as needed-preferably right before the implementation in the next iteration (sprint). Thus maintaining the just-enough and just-in-time nature of your story evolution.

One of the benefits of this approach is within distributed teams. These situations typically need richer documentation density with their requirements and this approach certainly provides it, while still maintaining an agile requirements approach.

As a final note, Alistair Cockburn has spent some time establishing the notion of Agile Use Cases. More information can be gleaned here on that topic – http://alistair.cockburn.us/Agile+Use+Cases

Next post, well finish with the other two misconceptions

Don’t forget to leave your comments below

Robert Bob’ Galen is the President and Principal Consultant of RGCG, L.L.C. Bob has held director, manager and contributor level positions in both software development and quality assurance organizations. He has over 25 years of experience working across a wide variety of software technology and product domains. Bob can be reached at [email protected].

It Ain’t Easy Being Agile

Written by Keith Ellis on September 8, 2009. Posted in Articles.

You have to admit – agile folks are conflicted. On one hand there’s the folks screaming requirements are dead***. On the other hand, people teaching agile practices have to explain the asterisks; mention these things called user stories and the practices of getting good user stories (like making each user story testable and how to deal with non-functional requirements). Then there are the folks rolling out these practices and using them in real life on complex engagements. We’re facing the issues of sequencing and redundancy of stories, figuring out which ones accidentally change the architecture of the system (oops!), which ones were really a whole book rather than just a story, etc. and how to actually get to the promised land of higher productivity. No wonder you get questions from developers like, “can I write down this non-functional requirement?” Agile is still a storm of mixed messages – and like the Internet bubble of the late 90s hype might do more harm than good to the movement over time.

Let’s get away from the hype and look at the facts of performance – meaning development efficiency, timeliness and stakeholder satisfaction. I recently looked at all of these variables in a large scale research study – The Business Analysis Benchmark. What I found is that Agile, Waterfall, Iterative, Prototyping/visualization-centric approaches all performed identically. Statistically there is absolutely no difference between any of them. What creates the performance difference is the level of requirements discovery and management maturity behind the primary SDLC selected. Any hype that says agile practices are universally better is simply wrong and detrimental over time. It will lead to very large scale and eventually public failures – and a counter-movement away from these practices. This would be a real shame. Agile is great stuff when used correctly.

Methods and practices of business analysis have to follow the mantra of “the right practices at the right time.” You can’t use OLTP analysis practices/techniques and expect to produce effective requirements on a data warehouse. It’s silly! Similarly, you want to target agile practices to the right projects where agile makes the most sense and have enough corporate requirements discovery and management maturity to know the difference. Anything else is like trying to blast a square peg through a round hole. If the stakeholders don’t want to participate in scrum meetings every day… get onto another track! If you’re dealing with something data driven or with very high numbers of transactions in a regulated system – run away… don’t walk. Yes, you could do it… why would you? I could run around on the freeway too, but I’m suggesting there are better ways to use some roads. In the long run, using the right techniques at the right time will pull far more momentum to the movement than creating hype and watching the carnage.

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Keith Ellis is the Vice President, Marketing at IAG Consulting (www.iag.biz) where he leads the marketing and strategic alliances efforts of this global leader in business requirements discovery and management. Keith is a veteran of the technology services business and founder of the business analysis company Digital Mosaic which was sold to IAG in 2007. Keith’s former lives have included leading the consulting and services research efforts of the technology trend watcher International Data Corporation in Canada, and the marketing strategy of the global outsourcer CGI in the financial services sector. Keith is the author of IAG’s Business Analysis Benchmark – the definitive source of data on the impact of business requirements on technology projects.

Authoring Requirements in an Agile World

Written by Tony Higgins on March 31, 2009. Posted in Articles.

Equipping and Empowering the Modern BA

The principles of agile development were proven before agile – as a defined approach – became vogue. Agile principles were being practiced to varying degrees in most organizations as a natural reaction to the issues surrounding a rigid waterfall approach.

Every individual task on a software project carries some degree of risk. There are many sources of these risks – some third party component may not function as advertised, some module your work is dependent on may not be available on time, inputs to the task were ambiguous and you made an incorrect assumption when ‘filling in the blanks’, the list is endless. All these risks in the individual tasks contribute to the overall project risk and, quite simply, risk isn’t retired until the task is done. Putting it another way, the risk associated with building something is really only retired when the thing is built. That’s the principle behind iterative and incremental development.

So instead of leaving the first unveiling of a new or enhanced application until toward the end of the project, break it down so that pieces (functional pieces) can be built incrementally. While this doesn’t always mean the portions are complete and shippable, stakeholders can see them working and try them out. This offers several advantages: it retires risk, as mentioned before. It often also exposes other hidden risks. These risks will surface at some point, and the earlier the better. Exposing hidden risk and retiring risk early makes the estimating process more accurate. This increases the probability of delivering applications of value that address the business needs in terms of capability as well as budget and schedule needs.

While agile is becoming main stream on small and mid-sized projects, challenges do exist elsewhere such as how to manage this approach on larger projects and in distributed development. Another challenge for many is how to apply a requirements lifecycle to agile projects. Many agile principles such as “just enough and no more”, to “begin development before all requirements are complete”, to “test first”, can be counter-intuitive. Also, what about non-functional requirements? What about testing independence? How can we cost something if we don’t know what the requirements are?

This article attempts to describe some ways to handle these challenges. It is based on an example of real, ongoing, and very successful product development that uses agile with a globally distributed team. It describes one set of techniques that is known to work.

Process Overview

There are many “flavors” of agile, but at a high level they all essentially adhere to the following basic principles:

PRINCIPLE	DESCRIPTION
Iterative	Both Requirements and Software are developed in small iterations
Evolutionary	Incremental evolution of requirements and software Just Enough “requirements details”
Time-Boxed	Fixed duration for requirements and software build Iterations
Customer Driven	We actively engage our customers in feature prioritization We embrace change to requirements/software as we build them
Adaptive Planning	We expect planning to be wrong

Requirements details as well as macro level scope are expected to change as we progress through our release.

For the purposes of this article, our example uses a Scrum-based Agile process1. In this approach the iterations (sprints) are two weeks in duration. A sprint is a complete development cycle where the goal is to have built some demonstrable portion of the end application. It should be noted that while the initial sprints do involve building a portion of the application, often this is infrastructure-level software that’s needed to support features to be developed in later sprints. This means there may not be much for stakeholders to “see”.

Each organization needs to determine the sprint duration that’s optimal for them. It needs to be long enough to actually build something, but not long enough for people to become defocused and go off track (thereby wasting time and effort). We found two weeks to be optimal for our environment.

Key during the first part of the process is to determine and agree on project scope, also known as the “release backlog”. Determining the release backlog itself could be a series of sprints where the product owner and other stakeholders iterate through determining relative priority or value of features along with high level costing of these features to arrive at a release backlog.

At the other end of the project, development of new code doesn’t extend to the last day of the last sprint. We typically reserve the last few sprints, depending on the magnitude of the release, for stabilization. In other words, in the last few sprints only bug fixing is done, and no net new features are developed. This tends to go against the agile purists approach to software development as each sprint should, in theory, develop production ready code. However, to truly achieve that requires significant testing and build automation that most organizations don’t have in place. This is always a good goal to strive towards, but don’t expect to achieve this right away.

Requirements Definition in this Process

There are several ways you could perform requirements definition in an agile process, but again our goal is to introduce an example that’s been tried and is known to work. This example begins with the assumption that you already have a good sense of the “business need”, either inherently in the case of a small and cohesive group, or by having modeled the business processes and communicating in a way that all understand. So we begin at the level of defining requirements for the application.

Requirements at the Beginning

Begin with a high-level list of features. Each feature is prioritized by Product Management or Business Analysts (depending on your organization). These features are typically then decomposed to further elaborate and provide detail and are organized by folder groupings and by type. If needed to better communicate you should create low-fidelity mockups or sketches of user interfaces (or portions) and even high-level Use Cases or abstract scenarios to express user goals. We sometimes do these and sometimes not, depending on the nature of what’s being expressed plus considering the audience we’re communicating with. For example, if we’re communicating a fairly simple concept (how to select a flight) and our audience is familiar with the problem space (they’ve built flight reservation applications before) then clear textual statements may be “just enough” to meet our goals at this stage. These goals are to establish rough estimates (variance of 50-100%) and based on these and the priorities, to agree on the initial scope of the release (what features are in and which are out).

Once reviewed, this list of features becomes the release backlog. The features are then assigned to the first several sprints based on priority and development considerations.

Click image for larger view
Example High Level Features with Properties

Requirements During the Sprint

With respect to the requirements, the principle of “just enough” is paramount. If the need has been expressed to a degree adequate enough to communicate and have it built as intended, then you’re done. Going further provides no additional value. This means you’ll have a varying level of detail for the requirements across the breadth of the product. For some parts of the product a high-medium level of detail may be “just enough”, while for other more complex areas a very fine level of detail may be needed.

In each sprint there are tasks of every discipline taking place. Requirements, design, coding, integration, and testing tasks are all being performed concurrently for different aspects of the system. The requirements being defined in one sprint will drive design and coding in a subsequent sprint. The net effect is that all these disciplines are active in every sprint of the lifecycle, but the relative emphasis changes depending on what stage you’re at in the project. For example, requirements tasks are being performed in all sprints, but they are emphasized more in the earlier sprints.

In each sprint, the high level features are elaborated into greater levels of detail. This more detailed expression of the requirements usually begins with usage scenarios/stories and/or visuals and it’s expressed in the form of a model. The models can emphasize user interface, use cases, scenarios, business rules, and combinations of these, depending upon the nature of what is being expressed. Sometimes these are created collaboratively but more often in our experience, one person creates an initial version and then holds a review with others for feedback. In our case it is typically the product managers and/or business analysts who create these models and usually between one to three reviews are held with the developers, testers and other stake holders. The review serves multiple purposes including:

To facilitate knowledge transfer to all stakeholders including architects, UE designers, developers, testers, and executive sponsors on what is needed
To allow the architects, UE Designers and developers to assess feasibility
To determine if there is sufficient detail in the requirements to allow development to proceed

With appropriate technology, tests are automatically generated from the requirements producing tests that are 100% consistent with the requirements and enable the immediate testing of code developed during sprints.

Continuous and Adaptive Planning

With this approach planning is continuous and adaptive throughout the lifecycle allowing resources to be redirected depending on new discoveries that come to light during each sprint. This ability to course correct in mid-flight is what gives projects their “agility”. At the end of each sprint we take stock of what was achieved during the sprint and record progress actuals. The work of the next sprint is adjusted as necessary based on this but also based on testing results, feedback from reviews of that sprint’s build, any new risks or issues that surfaced or others that were retired, and also any external changes in business conditions. Estimates and priorities are adjusted accordingly and any changes to release scope and sprint plans are made. In general we try not to make major mid-flight corrections during a sprint, which is one of the reasons why we like two week sprints. If sprints were, say, four weeks then we would lose agility. Also a two week sprint is easier and more accurate to estimate than a four week one.

Click image for larger view
Example Story with Tasks, and Estimates

With respect to the requirements, for those features assigned to the sprint along with any high-level requirements models, development creates high-level goals for the particular feature and estimates them. The goals express what aspects of the feature they will attempt to build during that sprint, recognizing that one sprint is often not enough time to implement an entire feature. The feature and its high-level goals become the content of the “story”. Once the story is defined the developer then details and estimates the tasks to be done for that story over the next two weeks (sprint) and proceeds with development, tracking daily progress against these tasks in an agile project management tool, and covering issues in the daily scrum.

What about the Non-functional Requirements?

The various agile approaches have evolved several techniques to express system functionality. These are things like user stories, use cases, or usage scenarios, that represent “observable system behaviors and artifacts that deliver value to users” like screens, reports, rules, etc. These functional requirements express “what” the system is to do. Examples of this could be things like “generate a stock-level report”, “make a car reservation”, “register for a webinar”, or “withdraw cash”.

Associated with the functionality of a system are its “qualities”. These express “how well” the system is supposed to do what it does – how fast, how reliably, how usable, and so on. Sometimes these non-functional requirements are associated with certain functional requirements and other times they apply to whole portions of the system or the entire system. So how do these very important requirements get accounted for in our agile process?

They are expressed at the high-level in the form of textual statements. For example: “Any booking transaction shall be able to be completed by a user (as defined in section a) in less than three minutes, 95% of the time”.

As functional requirements are decomposed and derived any associated non-functional requirements should similarly be decomposed, derived, and associated to lower levels. For example the above performance requirement is associated with all the “booking transaction” functional requirements (book a car, book a flight, book a hotel). If the functional requirements are decomposed into the lower level requirements “select a car”, “choose rental options”, and “check-out”, then the non-functional requirement may similarly be decomposed into requirements for selecting a car in less than 30 seconds, choosing options in less than one minute, and checking out in less than 1.5 minutes.

During review sessions the functional requirements take center stage. However, during these reviews any non-functional requirements that are relevant need to be presented and reviewed as well. Traceability is usually relied on to identify them. Any non-functional requirements relevant to the functional requirements of the story need to be expressed as part of the story, so the developer can take these into account during development.

QA needs to create tests to validate all requirements, including the non-functional requirements. Sometimes before a feature has been completely implemented, non-functional requirements can be partially tested or tested for trending, but usually cannot be completely tested until the feature is completely implemented (which can take several sprints).

What about Testing?

The high degree of concurrency in agile processes means that testing is performed in every sprint of the lifecycle. This can be a considerable change from traditional approaches and offers several benefits. First, it tends to foster a much more collaborative environment as the testers are involved early. It also, of course, means that items which wouldn’t have been caught until later in the lifecycle are caught early when they can be fixed much more cheaply.

In agile, Product Owners play a very big role in the testing process and they do so throughout the development lifecycle. Whereas many traditional approaches often rely on requirements specifications as “proxies” of the product owners, agile places much more reliance directly on the product owner effectively bypassing many issues that can arise from imperfect specifications. In addition to the product owners, developers also test. Test-driven development is a prominent technique used by developers in agile approaches where tests are written up-front and serve to guide the application coding as well as performing automated testing, which helps with code stability. To augment test driven development, which is primarily focused at the code level testing done by developers, new technologies that can auto-generate functional tests from functional requirements enable a QA team to conduct functional testing based on test cases that are not “out of sync” with the requirements specification. This enables the QA team to conduct testing on a continuous basis, since executable code and test cases are available throughout the lifecycle. In our example, all three are employed – product owner, development staff, and independent QA – on a continuous basis.

The requirements that we develop in our example are a decomposition of high-level text statements augmented by more detailed requirements models that give a rich expression of what is to be built. Requirements reviews are based on simulations of these models and they are incredibly valuable for a number of reasons. First, just as agile provides huge benefit by producing working software each sprint that stakeholders can see and interact with, simulation lets stakeholders see and interact with ‘virtual’ working software even more frequently. Second, people often create prototypes today trying to do much the same thing. The difference with prototypes, however, is that simulation engines built for requirements definition are based on use cases or scenarios and, therefore, guide the stakeholders in how one will actually use the future application, providing structure and purpose to the requirements review sessions. Prototypes, including simple interactive user interface mock-ups, on the other hand, are simply partial systems that ‘exist’ and provide no guidance as to how they are intended to be used. Stakeholders have to try to discover this on their own and never know if they’re correct or if something has been missed. It is important to note that the principle of “just enough” still applies when producing these models. We rely on the requirements review sessions held with designers/developers to determine when it is “enough.” This approach produces very high quality requirements and it is from these requirements that the tests are automatically generated. In fact, such thorough testing at such a rapid pace without automatic test generation is likely not possible.

Although we strive to have shipable code at the end of each sprint, this goal is not always achieved, and we may need to use the last sprint or two to stabilize the code. Since testing has already been taking place continuously before these final sprints, the application is already of considerably high quality when entering the stabilization phase, meaning risk is manageable and rarely is ship date missed.

What about Estimating?

Remember in agile it is typically ‘time’ that is fixed in the triad of time, features, and quality. In our approach also remember that, with continuous testing and the reserving of the final sprints for stabilization, quality tends to be fairly well known as well. This leaves the features as variable so what we’re actually estimating is the feature set that will be shipped.

As always, the accuracy of estimates is a function of several factors but I’m going to focus on just three

The quality of the information you have to base estimates on,
The inherent risk in what you’re estimating, and
The availability of representative historical examples that you can draw from.

In our approach, estimates are made throughout the development cycle, beginning in the initial scoping sprints. As mentioned earlier, once the list of candidate features is known and expressed at a high (scoping) level, they are estimated. Naturally at this point the estimates are going to be at their most “inaccurate” for the project lifecycle, since the requirements have not been decomposed to a detailed level (quality of information). This mean there is significant risk remaining in the work to be done. Similar projects done in the past may help mitigate some of this risk and help increase the accuracy of the estimates (e.g. we’ve done ten projects just like this and they were fairly consistent in their results).

The initial estimates are key inputs to the scoping and sprint-planning processes. As the project proceeds, with each sprint risks are exposed and dealt with, requirements are decomposed to finer levels of detail, and estimates naturally become more accurate. As you might guess, estimation is done toward the end of each sprint and is used in the planning of future sprints.

What about Distributed Teams?

Today distributed development is the norm. For reasons of efficiency, cost reduction, skills augmentation, or capacity relief, distributed development and outsourcing is a fact of life. There’s no free lunch however – there are costs associated with this approach, and much of these costs are borne in the requirements lifecycle. Chief among these is “communication”. There are practices and technologies that can mitigate this issue, so that the promised benefits of distributed development can be realized. The approach in this we’ve looked at here, for example, uses the following and has been very successful:

Concerted effort for more frequent communication (daily scrums, and other scheduled daily calls)
Liberal use of requirements simulation via web-meeting technology
Direct access to shared requirements models via a central server
Automated generation of tests and reviewing these in concert with the requirements to prove another perspective of what the product needs to provide.

Conclusion

“Have you heard that England is changing their traffic system to drive on the right-hand side of the road? But to ease the transition they’ve decided to phase it in – they’ll start with trucks”.

A common mistake of development organizations making the shift from waterfall to agile is that their organization mandates they still produce their big, heavy set of documents and have them reviewed at the same milestones, clinging to these familiar assets like security blankets. It doesn’t work. As scary as it might seem all significant aspects of the approach, like documentation, need to change in unison if it’s to be successful, and requirements are one of those significant aspects.

However if you still want that security blanket and you want to have some benefit of agile, at least generate your requirements specification in an agile manner (iterative, evolutionary, time boxed, customer driven, adaptive planning) that includes simulations integrated and driven by use cases traced to feature. This is one way to reap some agile benefits without making the leap all at once.

Risk is the ‘enemy’ on software projects. High risk profiles on projects drive uncertainty, render estimates inaccurate, and can upset the best of plans. One of the great things about agile is that its highly iterative nature continually ‘turns over the rocks’ to expose risk early and often so it can be dealt with.

On the other hand, one of the great challenges for larger and distributed teams is keeping everyone aligned as course-corrections happen sprint by sprint. A big part of this is the time and effort it takes to produce and update assets and the delays caused by imperfect and strained communication. The good news is that tools and technologies now exist to produce many of the assets automatically, and to also dramatically improve communication effectiveness, allowing agile to scale.

With the right approach, techniques and technology, distributed agile can be done. We’ve done it. So can you.

Tony Higgins is Vice-President of Product Marketing for Blueprint, the leading provider of requirements definition solutions for the business analyst. Named a “Cool Vendor” in Application Development by leading analyst firm Gartner, and the winner of the Jolt Excellence Award in Design and Modeling, Blueprint aligns business and IT teams by delivering the industry’s leading requirements suite designed specifically for the business analyst. Tony can be reached at [email protected].

References

1 The Scrum Alliance http://www.scrumalliance.org/

2 Approaches to Defining Requirements within Agile Teams
Martin Crisp, Retrieved 21 Feb 2009 from Search Software Quality, http://searchsoftwarequality.techtarget.com/tip/0,289483,sid92_gci1310960,00.html

3 Beyond Functional Requirements on Agile Projects
Scott Ambler, Retrieved 22 Feb 2009 from Dr.Dobb’s Portal, www.ddj.com/architect/196603549

4 Agile Requirements Modeling
Scott Ambler, Retrieved 22 Feb 2009 from Agile Modeling, http://www.agilemodeling.com/essays/agileRequirements.htm

5 10 Key Principles of Agile Software Development
Retrieved 22 Feb 2009 from All About Agile, http://www.agile-software-development.com/2007/02/10-things-you-need-to-know-about-agile.html

6 Agile Requirements Methods
Dean Leffingwell, July 2002, The Rational Edge

7 Requirements Honesty
Francisco A.C. Pinheiro, Universidade de Brasilia

8 Requirements Documents that Win the Race
Kirstin Kohler & Barbara Paech, Fraunhofer IESE, Germany

9 Engineering of Unstable Requirements using Agile Methods
James E. Tomayko, Carnegie Mellon University

10 Complementing XP with Requirements Negotiation
Paul Grunbacher & Christian Hofer, Johannes Kepler University, Austria

11 Just in Time Requirements Analysis – The Engine that Drives the Planning Game
Michael Lee, Kuvera Enterprise Solutions Inc., Boulder, CO. 03/09