Wednesday, January 09, 2008

When Requirements Go Bad: Requirements Errors

Yesterday I attended a talk on “When Requirements Go Bad: Requirements Errors - Sources and Avoidance Strategies” by Kurt Bittner. Kurt Bittner has co-authored two books: Managing Iterative Software Development Projects and Use Case Modeling.

Kurt Bittner Bio on InformIT
http://www.informit.com/authors/bio.aspx?a=4B75C773-9B16-4283-88F9-888B641A7058&rl=1

He categorized requirements errors into three categories
1. Misconception errors – user needs misconstrued
2. Specification errors – user needs understood but written ambiguously
3. Implementation errors – communication breakdowns and lack of enough reviews and testing

While above were the core of the talk, he also provided some typical errors and strategies to avoid them. The entire talk was excellent and worth the money, given that I am teaching a requirements management course this spring.

Date of the talk: January 8, 2008
Venue: University center, University of North Florida
Organized by: North Florida Rational Users Group
http://www.nf-rug.com/index.php