Monday, August 24, 2009

Agile Requirements Validation

Finally I have a little time to blog, so I'll talk briefly about the first presentation to which I assisted: "Agile Validation is Continuous and Collaborative: A Field Study of Agile Require[ments Validation]", by Rosalva Gallardo-Valencia. I wasn't particularly interested in the subject, however that was the only presentation given on Monday morning.

The researcher presented the results of a field study she conducted. She found out that in the Agile companies she surveyed, requirements are validated by the entire team in a continuous manner. She presented a UML sequence diagram with roles as "objects", where basically everyone ask questions to everyone else (product owner asks questions to the customer, developers ask questions to the product owner, etc.) to validate the requirements.

The presentation was not particularly interesting nor instructive, however I clearly saw a parallel with our efforts to integrate the test pilots in our development process a lot sooner, which is very good.

2 comments:

  1. What was the scale of the companies and projects that were surveyed?

    What is the difference between plain old requirements validation and agile requirements validation?

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  2. If I remember correctly the scale of the companies surveyed was rather small, 10-20 developers.

    With Waterfall the requirements get validated as soon as possible because they are the input for the other steps (design, etc.) They would also be validated by business analysts only.

    On the other hand, with Agile, the requirements get validated continuously during the whole process (1st difference). They also get validated collaboratively by the whole team (2nd difference), not just the business analysts.

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