Classic Business Analysis Articles

I was sorting through some of my bookmarks and articles I’ve accumulated over time via the Web, and found that there are a few articles and reference matieral that I  seem to refer back to time and again. I’ve provided links below to several articles/presentations I consider to be “classics” in the field of business analysis and requirements engineering that I think any analyst would benefit from reading.

Some are relatively new, and some have been around for quite a while but are still every bit as valid as the day they were published.

I hope you’ll get as much use and enjoyment from these resources as I have.

Elicitation

• Building a Requirements Foundation through Customer Interviews – Esther Derby
• Discovering Requirements by Trade-offs – Ian Alexander
• The Tactic: Always. Never. Everyone.

Analysis

• The Fuzzy Line Between Requirements and Design – Karl Wiegers
• Structured Analysis Wiki – Ed Yourdon
• 10 Requirements Traps to Avoid – Karl Wiegers

Specification

• Writing Good Requirements – Ivy Hooks
• Use Cases: Best Practices – Ellen Gottesdiener
• Why I still use Use Cases – Alistair Cockburn
• Defining Business Rules: What are they Really? – The Business Rules Group
• Business Rules vs. Business Requirements – Gladys Lam
• The Business Rules Manifesto – The Business Rules Group
• Painless Functional Specifications (Part 1 of 4) – Joel Spolsky
• What’s in a Story? – Dan North
• User Stories Quick Reference Guide – Virtual Genius
• Requirements 101: User Stories vs. Use Cases – Stellman & Greene
• Write, Think, Learn – Michael A. Covington

Validation

• Checklist for Fuzzy Requirements
• The Seven Deadly Sins of Software Reviews - Karl Wiegers

Communication/Collaboration

• Customer Rights and Responsibilities – Karl Wiegers
• Top 10 Team Practices – Mike Griffiths
• 8 Steps for Leading Change – J.P. Kotter

Methodology

• The Agile Business Analyst – Cottmeyer and Henson
• Up-front Requirements – James Shore
• The Pipelining Anti-Pattern – Mike Griffiths
• No Silver Bullet – Fred Brooks
• Lean Primer – Craig Larman and Bas Vodde
• Software Development as a Cooperative Game – Alistair Cockburn
• Agile Analysis – Scott Ambler
• The Agile Manifesto and the Twelve Principles of Agile Software
• Scrum in five minutes – Softhouse

Architecture

• Straight from the Shoulder – John Zachman

If you have any “classics” that you’d like to share, please comment so I can add to my collection and readers can add to theirs, too.

Keep an eye on this post – I’ll add more “classics” as I come across them.