Bookmarks & New Favorites (09-38)

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Here are a few of the articles I found “bookmark-worthy” over the past week.

• Improv Comedian Turns Business Analyst by Jonathan Kupersmith – Kupe draws out some of the parallels between comedy improv and the soft skills – or characteristics – that can really help an analyst “perform”.

• Bridging Documents by Karl Wiegers – “It’s not unusual for a well-meaning requirements analyst to carefully prepare a software requirements specification and deliver it to the development team and testers, only to have the recipients gripe about it.”

• Creating wireframes and mockups – Includes some wireframing fundamentals, and then reviews of some of the more common wireframing tools.

• Using User Stories by George Dinwiddie – List a few advantages of user stories, and includes a link to a helpful handout on “writing and splitting” user stories.

• Where’s the juice in  your requirements? from Hobbs on Tech

Requirements are difficult. I should say good requirements are hard to put together. One thing to look for in requirements, instead of a shopping list, is the juice in requirements. Sure you may need a bag of oranges, but what you’re really after is orange juice. Of course, you also need a knife, juicer, pitcher, glasses, and to know how to make orange juice. But really, orange juice on it’s own really isn’t that interesting a requirement since pretty much anyone can make orange juice. So ideally you want to dig deeper and define more clearly what kind of juice you are attempting (perhaps mint orange juice made at your table?).

• Thoughts on Lean Thinking by Dean Leffingwell

• An entire ERP system in a single diagram from Kishore Kumar – It’s just as it says. An image of a UML package view of an entire ERP package. I’m just sharing it because I liked it and thought it could be useful. There’s something to be said for having that high-level, overall view of “what this thing does.”