Do Not Design for Users

Requirements Management Blogs

In this blog post, Mike Long discusses the current trend to design applications for specific users or “personas”. His point is that “focusing on individuals might improve things for one person at the cost of others.” He prefers instead Activity-Centered Design (ACD) that focuses on the activity context in which individuals interact with the product.

Persona have become the center of human-centered design (UCD), but they are a proxy for real customer when they are not participating enough to the project. According to Mike, using personas increases the risk of feature bloat. Instead of analyzing individuals as personas, you should analyze the situation from an activity perspective using a human activity diagram. The post explains how to draw this diagram with a concrete example.

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Articles Knowledge

Reviewing Requirements for Testability

Modern software development approaches like Agile and Scrum support a strong collaboration between all member of the software development team, software testers and business analysts included. Even if you don’t use a method like Behavior-Driven Development (BDD) or Specification by Example, checking the fact that you will be able to actually test your requirements is […]

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Requirements Management Articles
Articles Knowledge

Understanding System Analysis Models

This article is an extract of the “Complete Systems Analysis” written by James and Suzanne Robertson. It explains the basics of analysis models and emphasize that the important thing to remember is that modeling tools are complementary. Each shows one aspect of the system. Together, they make a complete working model of the system.

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Requirements Management Blogs
Blogs Knowledge

Find Missing Requirements

This blog post by Betsy Stockdale explains how to use the Feature Tree model to discover missing requirements.

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