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I’m working on modeling some requirements for a document management system. I’m a big fan of using models to represent every element, from goals and strategies through to business processes. From there, I model use cases and requirements and
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Some methodologies of software architecture, including EWITA , attempt to describe architectural processes in a manner that is quite separate from the development of software. Is that valid? To whit, the first step in the EWITA process is described
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Sometimes I hear a complaint from an IT architect who wants to have direct conversations with “the business” or “the customer” but, for some reason (usually bureaucratic), they cannot. There is a team of analysts or project managers that they are
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The dark cloud of the economic downturn has produced a silver lining within Microsoft IT: an increased emphasis on Agile development techniques. This does not mean that MS IT is new to using Agile. Far from it. Agile development practices
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Ah, the sweet sounds of success. I got the opportunity, this week, to collect a list of requirements for a strategic planning tool that we will license and use within Microsoft IT (COTS). The fact that I got to collect requirements is not
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It's been a while since I was blogging regularly. The reason: I was in a ship cycle. As we approached our deadline for delivery of a comprehensive end-to-end information model for information technology, more and more of my time was spent focusing on
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Of all the ‘laws of software’ that I subscribe to, this one is one of the most fundamental, and unwavering. I cannot find an exception to it, and years of experience reinforce it for me. I can look at a chunk of source code, or an operations
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There are a great many products on the market these days that provide information about a set of projects. The idea is to let the stakeholders know how well their money is being spent. Information Technology departments often get criticized
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In my last post , I highlighted the design process, suggesting that designers and architects should consider using creativity, in addition to methods and patterns, to build a truly useful system. In this one, I'd like to talk about the business
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I've seen various taxonomies of requirements. Like all taxonomies, any set of requirement types exists to classify or partition requirements into coherent groups for further analysis. Most break down the list of requirements into things reminiscent
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Todd Biske, whom I respect for his writings on SOA, seemed to miss the mark in his recent blog post about SOA Governance and Decision Rights. In that post, he said: if you focus on education, you can allow individual teams to make decisions, because
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A Use case is a cool thing. A little too cool. The term has been occasionally misused, and in some respects, that misuse diminishes the value of a use case. To succeed, we have to know what a use case is. When you are done
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Requirements elicitation is a critical, yet under-appreciated, activity. A core capability of business analysts, the ability to get the customers to describe what they want, and need, is both a science and an art. Requirements elicitation
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In a prior post, I described a process modeling antipattern which I called " Blame the Computer ." The feedback helped me to realize that there's a deeper problem that we need to consider: alignment of ownership between process and IT. Ownership of a
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I'm a big fan of use cases. Great for describing how software is used, and puts context around the use of functionality that helps software developers to create solutions that will actually fit into human activities. On the other hand, are
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