innovations in requirements management for better feedback and better software
DESCRIPTION
It’s been a long time since technology and process innovations have allowed development teams to change and improve the way they deliver software to their users. Agile software development was the last major change: the further evolution of those and other practices, along with recent innovations in cloud computing and other areas, have given teams even better ways to manage the requirements and features delivered to users. This talk focuses on using those innovations to not just “track and capture requirements,” but to create and deliver better software for your users.TRANSCRIPT
Innovations in Requirements Management for Better
Feedback and Better Software
Michael Coté, RedMonk@cote | PeopleOverProcess.com
1Thursday, February 24, 2011
who is RedMonk?
• Broad focus on software, developers, “makers.”
• Applying emerging technologies to practical use
• Developer Relations
• Bottom-up-approach to understanding software
• Our research is free at RedMonk.com - text, podcasts, videos, etc.
James GovernorMichael Coté
Stephen O’Grady Tom Raftery
2Thursday, February 24, 2011
conclusions
•Keep your ALM tool-chain updated, more than likely
•Seek faster feedback-loops
•Deliver Frequent Functionality
•More discipline is being snuck in
3Thursday, February 24, 2011
agile is mainstream
•Somewhere between 35 to 45 to 76% (2009 figures)*
•2nd place after “no methodology”
•Effects: in-housing dev tasks, shorter cyclers, feedback fiends, new tools needed
*Forrester, 2009/2010 and Scott Ambler/Dr. Dobbs 2009
4Thursday, February 24, 2011
“I can actually look at [a feature] and say, ‘nobody uses feature X.’ It's not even being looked at. And it really helps us shape the future of the app which, on a desktop product, we don't have a lot of data like that.”- Brian Sweat, Product Manager at Alterity, Inc.
Source: RIA Weekly #69
5Thursday, February 24, 2011
fast cycles for user feedback
•Taking advantage of SaaS/cloud refresh cycle optimization
•Experiment and observe user behavior
•Adding user behavior for product management
•Think of expensive, but valuable UX input
6Thursday, February 24, 2011
dev/ops theory and work
•Scoped to Cloud and SaaS
•Making sysadmins part of the application
•Enabling speedy Agile - a release a day
•Many safety nets are needed, and are being developed
7Thursday, February 24, 2011
“...the site is now hosting one million projects, confirmed Scott Chacon, VP of Research and Development at GitHub. Approximately 60 percent of these projects are full repositories...while the remaining 40 percent are ‘gists,’ or short code snippets contained in a single file.”- TechCrunch, July 2010
Source: http://techcrunch.com/2010/07/24/github-one-million/
8Thursday, February 24, 2011
social programming
•GitHub as the Facebook for developers
• Tracking people, projects...and git hosting
• Collaboration, in public or private
• Code reviews fun again...?
9Thursday, February 24, 2011
SaaS hosting the toolchain
•An obvious improvement - mature, even, e.g., Rally
•Cloud technologies have made it possible, cheap
•Simplify project management for your project management
•Locked rooms & Lawyers - regulations still exist
10Thursday, February 24, 2011
bundling dev suites together
•Goals of simplifying, speeding up, cross-platform
•Builds, bugs, requirements, even platforms with PaaS
•Beware vendors building platform lock-in, unless you want that
11Thursday, February 24, 2011
bottom-up tracking
•Mylyn example
• Self-improvement/self micro-management
• A point of project collaboration
•Giving decision makers real data
12Thursday, February 24, 2011
controls & governance
•Of course these still exist
•When moving faster, tracking is even more important
•Politics trumps code - there’s no way to code out lawyers & regulators
13Thursday, February 24, 2011
ALM evaluation homework
•Flexibility to adapt tool - integration, process change, reports
•Workflow integration - email, IM, IDE maybe mobile
•Focus on Frequent Functionality & Feedback
•Learn about distributed version control
14Thursday, February 24, 2011
ContactMichael Coté
512.795.4307
Thank you!http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/2.5/
License
15Thursday, February 24, 2011