Amplify Amplify your take on things.  Join Jonathan Babcock on Amplify

Practical Amplify

Companion resource to the Practical Analyst blog
« Amplog Home   Posts tagged: specification
8
15

Jonathan Babcock's Recent Activity

thanked estherderby for the clip
Lining Up Priorities

Categories

Open/Social requirements definition for gov’t projects?

Interesting thoughts on a social/open environment for requirements definition for government projects - acquisitions in particular for this article.

Amplify’d from fcw.com

Imagine if we opened up the requirements process to anyone who wanted to participate and did so in a transparent and collaborative forum through structured processes and Web 2.0 tools. Using the wisdom of the crowd to define requirements and the best development process, participants could propose ideas based on experience, good practices and standards; question and weed out bad ideas; build on one another’s ideas; and float the best to the top.

Put aside for now questions about the manageability of the process, operating within the Federal Acquisition Regulation, when to apply this crowd-sourcing, open strategy, etc. Although business certainly has a financial motivation, individuals participate in peer production communities because of personal passion, a desire for recognition of their expertise or just a desire to be part of the community.

If managed effectively, there is enormous value in co-creation and applying resources outside your borders. And imagine what this might do to attract and retain the Net Generation workforce we are always seeking out. They live and thrive in the online, collaborative, open environment.

Read more at fcw.com
 

Improving Requirements - Gov’t Acquisitions

Some good self-analytical questions for getting to the bottom of requirements definition problems.

Amplify’d from fcw.com
What makes defining requirements such a challenge for us? Do we have the skills to write good requirements documents for complex acquisitions that enable adaptability for change during development life cycle? Are we working too hard to get requirements 100 percent right before we move forward? Are we focused on defining the “how” instead of working to define success? Are resource shortages forcing shortcuts that eventually only prolong the timeline and costs and increase the risk of failure?
And the final question: Would making the requirements development process more open, collaborative and transparent help?Read more at fcw.com
 

The idea of requirement patterns is to provide guidance…

No Commentary

Amplify’d from www.withallyourequire.com
Many types of requirements crop up again and again, no matter what a particular new system is for. The idea of requirement patterns is to provide guidance on how to specify common types of requirements, to make it quicker and easier to write them, and to improve the quality of those requirements. A requirement pattern is applied at the level of an individual requirement: to explain how to write a requirement of that type.
A requirement pattern can also suggest additional topics for which to write requirements.Read more at www.withallyourequire.com
 

Ideas, Images, Words

Really interesting description of how images and words describe ideas.

Amplify’d from www.ddj.com

Wang Bi, a third-century Chinese scholar, has this to say in “General Remarks on the Changes of the Zhou”:

Images are the means to express ideas. Words are the means to explain the images. To yield up ideas completely, there is nothing better than images, and to yield up the meaning of images, there is nothing better than words.
In other words, he suggests that to capture ideas from the problem space, we need both imaging tools and descriptive tools.Read more at www.ddj.com