The common wisdom is that Agile register requirements using the user stories format: “”As a , I want <goal/desire> so that “. In this article, Earl Beede explains why user stories are not requirements.

When you are gathering and documenting software requirements, it is not always easy to remember all the dimension that should be included in this activity. The book “Mastering the Requirements Process” proposes a template that should help you in this activity.

The power of a service-oriented architecture (SOA) is in its ability to enable business agility through business process integration and reuse. SoaML (Service-Oriented Architecture Modeling Language) is an Object Management Group (OMG) standard that is intended to help realize the potential of SOA.

The Unified Modeling Language (UML) is a modeling language standardized by the Object Management Group (OMG) used to manage requirements in software development projects. IDEF, the acronym for Integration DEFinition, refers to a family of modeling languages in the field of systems and software engineering.

A user story is a tool to describe the product functionality, but it is less useful suited to describe in detail the user interaction. Agile scenarios and storyboards are tools you need to describe the interaction steps. In his post, Roman Pichler what scenarios and storyboards are, how they can be used effectively in an Agile approach and how they relate to user stories.

Acceptance tests and requirements are linked. You can’t have one without the other. The tests clarify and amplify the requirements. A test that fails shows that the system does not properly implement a requirement. A test that passes is a specification of how the system works.

Value-based software engineering (VBSE) is an approach that take into account the fact that software has a major influence on most systems’ cost, schedule, and value. Software decisions are inextricably intertwined with system-level decisions. In this article, Barry Boehm discusses the basic principles of value-based software engineering and explains why value-neutral methods are insufficient as a basis of a software engineering discipline.

Requirements Modeling Language (RML) offers a notation for requirements modeling which combines object-orientation and organization, with an assertional sublanguage used to specify constraints and deductive rules. RML provides both an object-centered modeling framework and an ontology for requirements modeling.

When the business changes rapidly, this is a problem for a development team that has in its current release trunk both approved and unapproved features. In this blog post, Jack Low presents a solution to minimise the issues created by unapproved features in the codebase at the time of a release and contrasts this approach with popular alternatives like Feature Branching and Feature Toggling.

A user story map is a technique created by Jeff Patton where you arranges you user stories into a useful model to help understand the functionality of the system. In this blog post, Steve Rogalsky explains how to create a user story map.