Jonathan Babcock

As I was skimming Gary Chin’s book Agile Project Management, I came across a method I liked for determining whether to use classic or agile management methods.

I’ve long been of the opinion that involving as many stakeholders in the project as early as possible is a key to successful business analysis, and, more importantly, to successful projects, and have said as much in a few of my posts on this site.

Jim Highsmith, in the book Agile project management : creating innovative products, thinks that the reason projects tend to have so much documentation and so few results is that:

In my business analysis group, we identify user requirements through use cases, but we don’t use user stories. As I am not extremely well-versed when it comes to some of the agile methods, I thought I’d do some research to learn more about user stores and to determine how user stories are different from use cases and from traditional requirements.

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I’ve noticed a recurring discussion around various business analysis-oriented websites [...]

This post is based on a quote I read and liked from the article, “When Requirements Go Bad: Part II” by Kurt Bittner. The article is available from Dr. Dobb’s Requirements Development e-zine (free subscription required). According to Bittner:

We need to banish the practice of writing requirements that we can “throw over the wall” to developers or testers and instead pursue a more open, communicative approach. What is important to realize is that requirements are what motivate discussions, but it is the discussion that matters most.

Well said. While I’ve taken an occasionally rocky path to get there, my experience as a BA has led me to the same conclusion.

I really, really like Kelly Waters’ blog All About Agile.

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(Updated post title - 11/03/07)
Here are some noteworthy quotes and concepts I’ve come across this week.
Nancy Knettell, Agile development: Don’t forget the documentation. Great article. I’d actually begun to outline a post on this recently, but see no need for it now. I like the idea of delivering functionality more quickly, but wouldn’t sacrifice [...]