Applied Software Project Management

Diagnosing Software Requirements Problems

Project teams that have problems specifying the software requirements often find that their projects suffer from a few typical problems. Strangely, many programmers and project managers do not realize that they are problems at all. There is a common and mistaken belief that they are just characteristics of how software is typically developed. But when software teams adopt good requirements engineering practices, they find that these problems are greatly reduced, and that their projects go much more smoothly.

Iteration Abuse

Iteration, or the repetition of a particular task or activity with the goal of improving its main work product, is a practice employed by many programmers. There are several popular development methodologies (Extreme Programming and Rational Unified Process, for example—see Chapter 12) that rely on iterative development. These methodologies use iteration effectively, by planning and executing a series of small steps that build on previous iterations to produce a series of intermediate builds; each successive build adds new functionality to a previous build. Each build is intended to be production quality, and is fully tested. Changes are controlled by having each new iteration concentrate on adding new functionality, rather than making many changes to existing behavior.

However, many software teams abuse iteration. They do not use successive iterations to add new functionality to a build that is already production quality. ...