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About the author.

I’m Paul Seibert, Editor of Boston’s Hub Tech Insider, a Boston focused technology blog. I have been working in the software engineering and ecommerce industries for over fifteen years. My interests include computers, electronics, robotics and programmable microcontrollers, and I am an avid outdoorsman and guitar player. You can connect with me on LinkedIn, follow me on Twitter, follow me on Quora, even friend me on Facebook if you’re cool. I own and am trying to sell a dual-zoned, residential & commercial Office Building in Natick, MA. I have a background in entrepreneurship, ecommerce, telecommunications and software development, I’m a PMO Director, a serial entrepreneur and the co-founder of several ecommerce and web-based software startups, the latest of which is Tshirtnow.net.

How to optimize your web based software application for the mobile web August 7, 2011

Posted by HubTechInsider in Mobile Software Applications, Product Management, Project Management.
Tags: Android (operating system), Apple, Cascading Style Sheets, ecommerce, Internet Explorer, iOS, iPad, iPhone, Mobile application development, Mobile Applications, Mobile Computing, mobile web, Software Development, Software Engineering, Style Sheets, Web application
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The mobile web is where the action is in 2011. We have all seen the polls and the statistics: people are spending more and more time accessing the web through their mobile smartphones and mobile tablet computers. The mobile Web grew 110 percent in the U.S. last year and 148 percent worldwide as measured by growth in pageviews.

Including devices such as the Kindle, the iPhone and other smartphones, web-enabled tablets, GPS systems, video games and wireless home appliances, the growth of the mobile web has been exponential — and we’re still just at the beginning of this cycle. Morgan Stanley’s analysts believe that, based on the current rate of change and adoption, the mobile web will be bigger than desktop Internet use by 2015. The proliferation of better devices and the availability of better data coverage are two trends driving growth; having better services and smaller, cheaper devices has led to a huge explosion in mobile technology that far outpaces the growth of any other computing cycle.

Global 3G penetration is expected to hit 21% this year. In Japan, where the U.S. looks to find its mobile roadmap for the future, 96% of mobile subscribers already have 3G coverage. In Western Europe, the penetration is around 54%, just slightly above 46% in the U.S. In developing and/or economically depressed areas, including the Middle East, Africa, parts of Asia, Eastern Europe and South America, 3G penetration is still in the single digits. 3G access is a key point in the success of the mobile web, providing very usable surfing speeds for mobile web usage.

In addition, mobile e-commerce is ramping up faster than online e-commerce, now making up 4% of total retail sales. In certain categories, such as computers, consumer electronics, music, movies, tickets, video games and books, online sales account for between 45% and 20% of the total retail market. Japan’s Rakuten shows how the mobile share of e-commerce is growing as well, from 10% of e-commerce in 2006 to nearly 20% now.

Video now accounts for 69% of mobile data traffic, and the overlap between mobile users and social web users continues to grow; more and more users are accessing the social web from a mobile device. Real-time technology and location-based services are expected to drive mobile retail, and a very interesting fact is that the average iPhone user only spends 45% of his on-device time making voice calls.

Some more mobile web usage statistics and facts:

More people have mobile phones than Internet-connected PCs (4 billion)
SMS penetration ~50% and fully mainstream (82% of users <24 y.o.)
82 million Americans can recall seeing advertising on their phone over last 3 mos. (approx. 30% of 270m adult phone users)
25% of phone users (65 mm) are accessing the mobile web but 80% of iPhone users are
40% of Twitter users use the Internet on their phones (76% if you include WiFi) (Pew)
Internet Advertising Bureau survey found that 62 percent of agencies, media planners and advertisers believe mobile ad spending will continue to grow and emerge in marketing budgets
Mobile device is increasingly becoming small, portable PC experience with an Internet browser experience similar to that of 2000/2001 (just diff’t form factor)
In 2007, eMarketer reports that US advertisers spent $900 million on mobile, and double in 2008 to $1.7 billion
21 million iPhones + ~20 million iPod Touches = 40-45million iPod-like devices
50,000 apps from iTunes App Store and Nokia, RIM, MSFT and others now w app stores; 1 billion+ app downloads to date
70% of people sleep with their mobile phones (Zumobi)
More than 60 million mobile views per month for New York Times; one of 4 apps pre-loaded on the Palm Pre
Joseph Porus of Harris Interactive: “”Mobility could be recession-proof and be one of the strongest ways of effectively marketing in tough economic times”
35% of mobile advertising campaigns cost less than $10,000 (Forrester)

Mobile Device Product Categories & Feature Sets

There are four primary mobile device product categories in widespread use today, and each of these four mobile device product categories is typically configured by the device manufacturers with a certain base set of features and functionality. The four mobile device product categories, listed with their typical bandwidth usage per month, are:

Feature Phones: Feature Phones such as the Motorola Razr are used primarily to make calls, and they consume little bandwidth even for web activities because they have stripped-down web browsers. Feature phones and their users tend to consume around 100 Megabytes of data downloads a month, using 4 MB of voice calls an hour, and 4 to 5 MB of web browsing per hour.
Smartphones: Smartphones such as Research in Motion’s popular Blackberry are used for phone calls, email, and light web browsing. Smartphones and their users tend to consume around 185 Megabytes of total monthly data downloads, utilizing 4 MB per hour for voice calls, and 4 to 5 MB of web browsing.
Superphones: Superphones are advanced smartphones, including Apple’s iPhone and Motorola’s Droid, that make it easy for people to surf the web and watch online videos, leading to much higher bandwidth use. Superphones and their users tend to consume around 560 Megabytes of total monthly data downloads, using 4 MB per hour for voice calls, 40 MB per hour for web browsing, 60 MB per hour for internet radio, and 200 MB per hour for YouTube videos.
Tablet Computers: Tablet computers such as Apple’s newly unveiled iPad are likely to send data use even higher. The iPad will chew up even more bandwidth than the iPhone because of its larger screen. Tablet computer and iPad users tend to consume 800 to 1,000 Megabytes of total monthly data downloads, using 50 to 60 MB per hour for web browsing, 60 MB per hour for internet radio, and 300 to 400 MB per hour for YouTube videos.

If your web based application or site is not optimized for the mobile web, you are falling behind and losing out on transaction revenue, sales, data, customers: you name it.

There are many methods and techniques that can be used to optimize your web based application or site for the mobile web. In this article I will describe how I optimized a commercial b2c ecommerce application for the mobile web, and then I will go into more details as to how you can use the same techniques I used on the http://www.tshirtnow.net mobile site and also how you can use different techniques to optimize your own web-based mobile application or site.

For the tshirtnow.net mobile site, I utilized a technique to present a mobile-optimized version of the tshirtnow.net web site to mobile browser users such as those surfing the web site on an iPhone, iPad, or Android mobile phone, and the regular version of the tshirtnow.net web site to users who were accessing the web-based b2c tshirtnow.net ecommerce application from regular web browsers on a desktop or laptop computer with a browser like Google Chrome or Microsoft Internet Explorer.

But using a special CSS stylesheet that is optimized for mobile browsers, along with the reglar tshirtnow.net CSS stylesheet, we are able to automatically detect what type of mobile browser platform the user is currently accessing the tshirtnow.net web site with. Using the CSS information contained in the tshirtnow.net mobile cascading style sheet (CSS), we are able to render the exact same html content which represents the different pages on the site such as product detail pages, order status pages, and the home page with different formating and styles, and even content sections, all just by using CSS.

The advantages of this technique are rather obvious. First of all, there is no need to recreate dozens or even hundreds of static html content pages, as the exact same content and pages can be cleverly re-purposed simply by providing for planned degradation of the user’s web experience according to what type of mobile device and mobile browser platform they are currently using.

Secondly, the use of CSS to provide a mobile optimized experience allows for the use of special CSS tags and techniques which can provide iPhone and iPad iOS orientation (landscape or portrait) and touch detection, intelligent web page scaling, special mobile OS (iPhone, iPad iOS or Android, Blackberry, HP WebOS) controls and rich media player capabilities, and phone/web integrated telephony. I will go into much more detail about some of these advanced CSS capabilities and I will provide more information about them as well as links to more resources on the web later in this article.

I encourage readers of this article who have not already done so, to read my previous article, a Glossary of mobile Web Terminology, for references to some of the terms I will use throughout this article. Knowing mobile web terminology will also assist you in creating wireframes and mockups for mobile web applications, and will be a great boon to your mobile application software specifications as well.

The tshirtnow.net mobile web site

For tshirtnow.net, I utilized a mobile optimized CSS style sheet. It detects which type of browser platofrm the user is accessing the tshirtnow.net web site with, and then serves that user either the regular tshirtnow.net home page, or the mobile optimized tshirtnow.net home page. Here is what most users see when they access the tshirtnow.net web site with a normal desktop computer browser:

And here is what a user accessing the same tshirtnow.net home page using mobile safari on an Apple iPhone would see:

The mobile version of the tshirtnow.net home page, as seen on an Apple iPhone (iOS)

As you can see, iPhone users see a gently degraded web page, which contains many of the most important, but not nearly all, of the controls, links, graphics and content of the normal tshirtnow.net home page. This mobile-specific version of the exact same web page is presented to the user not though the use of another web page, but simply through the use of the mobile-optimized style sheet.

Here is another example of how the tshirtnow.net b2c ecommerce web application is able to detect a mobile browser user and serve up content optimized for mobile from the exact same html page. Here is what the order status page looks like to a user accessing the tshirtnow.net web site from a regular desktop computer browser like Microsoft Internet Explorer or Mozilla Firefox:

And here is what a user accessing the same tshirtnow.net order status page using mobile safari on an Apple iPhone would see:

The mobile version of the tshirtnow.net order status page (iOS)

You can see that not only has the check order status button been dynamically resized in order to accomodate the smaller screen width of the iPhone mobile safari browser, but also that the hairline css curved corners border around the order number and email address input form fields has been resized too. All of this dynamic width modification, including the button graphic itself, which is rendered using standards-based css, happens on the fly from one set of html pages.

If you perform platform-specific css coding into your mobile stylesheet, which I will demonstrate how to do later in this article, then you can take advantage of such features as iOS iPad and iPhone orientation detection and dynamic adjustment, touch interface enhancements, and CTI, or Computer Telephony Integration features like click-to-call:

iOS platform-specific controls like this iPhone selection dial are supported natively through CSS

A typical b2b or b2c web-based ecommerce application that provides content pages that are driven by databases and displaying and presenting the results of database queries can produce thousands of individual web pages. To provide a mobile-optimized version of each of these pages is a prohibitively expensive and time-consuming endeavor that is beyond the performance envelope of most software development organizations.

The skillset needed to perform heavy CSS manipulations and platform-specific mobile optimizations may not be present on your current software development team. J2ee and other types of system and application software programmers may not have the requisite ability to manipulate and create a mobile optimized CSS stylesheet, and the necessary experience required to effectively develop and test platform-specific and progressively enhanced mobile CSS may not be present on your current team.

By utilizing a mobile CSS stylesheet to render the same content pages, you have provided a way to render those thousands of dynamic, database-driven web pages on the fly, and ready for your mobile web users. For example, here is one of the many thousands of product detail pages on the tshirtnow.net ecommerce site, as it would appear to a normal desktop web browser:

And here is what a user accessing the same srv tshirt product detail page using mobile safari on an Apple iPhone would see:

A mobile version of a tshirtnow.net tshirt product page (iOS)

You can see that the mobile version of the tshirtnow.net product detail page contains less content, and the content that is displayed on the mobile version of the product detail page is in a different location than the content on the regular, desktop browser version of the tshirtnow.net product detail page. All of this is performed not through HTML manipulations or server side includes, but is instead accomplished exclusively through the use of CSS.

Product detail page features such as tags are specially presented on Apple iPhone iOS through CSS

Because of this use of CSS to render mobile versions of the same html content pages, all scenarios have been accounted for, opening up the entire tshirtnow.net web site, all products, all static html content pages, all dynamic interaction controls such as search engines and results pages, are made available to mobile web browsers using this technique.

If instead the decision had been made to create unique, static html pages for mobile browsers, then a detection mechanism such as WURL or user-agent string detection would have had to have been employed in order to serve up unique html pages. The program to create many thousands of unique pages for all of the major functions, plus a unique mobile template for all of the product detail pages, would have been extremely cost and resource intensive.

Tips for Handheld CSS Style Sheets

Handheld media stylesheets should be as small and compact as possible because of download time.

What can you do to simplify your site and make it more usable in mobiles? First, eliminate some of these problematic items from mobile display.

Eliminate floats and frames
Eliminate columns – one column with the content first is the best option
Eliminate scripted effects such as popups or pop out menus in favor of plain old HTML and simple text menus
Eliminate decorative images that slow down the loading process. Use display:none to remove anything that isn’t absolutely necessary, such as links to external resources. Remember, however, that devices that don’t understand CSS won’t do anything withdisplay: none. Any essential images need to be reworked for the small screen and the width and height attributes need to be included in the HTML.
Eliminate nested tables and layout tables. If you have tabular data, consider finding a way to present it in a linearized alternate display.

Once you’ve simplified through elimination, start building the rules you need to add. Consider these ideas.

If you’re not already using relative measures, switch to ems or percentages rather than pixels
Reduce margins, paddings and borders to suit the small screen
Use smaller font sizes for headings and paragraph text
If you have a long navigation list at the start of the page, add a skip to main content link, or move the links to the end of document flow. Keep the number of clicks required to get to content as minimal as humanly possible. Without a mouse or keyboard, most mobile users have to click laboriously through any top navigation.
Make sure your color combinations provide good contrast between foreground and background colors, particularly for devices with fewer color options.

Sample Handheld CSS Stylesheet

/* mobile styles */


@media handheld {
html, body {
         font: 12px/15px sans-serif;
         background: #fff;
         padding: 3px;
         color: #000;
         margin: 0;
         }
#sidebar, #footer {
         display: none;
         }
h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6 {
         font-weight: normal;
         }
#content img {
         max-width: 250px;
         }
.center {
         width: 100%; !important;
         text-align: center;
         }
a:link, a:visited {
         text-decoration: underline;
         color: #0000CC;
         }
a:hover, a:active {
         text-decoration: underline;
         color: #660066;
         }
}
/* iPhone-specific styles */
@media only screen and (max-device-width: 480px) {
html {
-webkit-text-size-adjust: none;
}

}

Resources for testing your mobile applications

As with any other type of Web design, testing is a big part of the process. However, testing websites for mobile devices brings additional challenges, and fortunately, there are some tools available that were created especially for these purposes:

Opera Mini Browser Simulator

http://www.opera.com/mobile/demo/

The Opera Web browser comes with a feature that is of use to QA – the Opera Small Screen Renderer.

This tool can be used to test any Web page and see how it will look in a tiny window like on a cell phone. To use it:

Download the latest version of Opera.

Go to the page you want to test.
Hit Shift-F11.
The screen will switch to a narrow version of the page.
When you’re done testing, hit Shift-F11 to toggle back to normal view.

Apple iPhone Safari Debugging and Testing Tips & Instructions:

http://developer.apple.com/safari/library/documentation/AppleApplications/Reference/SafariWebContent/DebuggingSafarioniPhoneContent/DebuggingSafarioniPhoneContent.html#//apple_ref/doc/uid/TP40006515-SW1

W3C mobileOK Checker:

http://validator.w3.org/mobile/

ready.mobi mobile site automated checker & reporting tool:

Ready.mobi

Blackberry Device Simulators:

http://na.blackberry.com/eng/developers/resources/simulators.jsp

Nokia Mobile Phone Simulator:

http://mtld.mobi/emulator.php?emulator=nokiaN70&webaddress=mtld.mobi

OpenWave Phone Simulator:

http://developer.openwave.com/dvl/tools_and_sdk/phone_simulator/

iPhoney iPhone Simulator for OS X:

http://www.marketcircle.com/iphoney/

How to setup desktop Safari on Windows and OS X to emulate iPad and iPhone:

http://developer.apple.com/safari/library/technotes/tn2010/tn2262.html

Mobile Phone Web-based Emulator:

http://emulator.mtld.mobi/emulator.php?emulator=sonyK750&webaddress=stepforth.mobi

BrowserCam Cross-Browser Device Screen Captures:

(Instantly see mobile pages in any browser on device operating systems)

http://www.browsercam.com/Default2.aspx

W3C Mobile Test Harness:

http://www.w3.org/2007/03/mth/harness

Cameron Moll’s Mobile HTML & CSS Styling Test Pages:

http://cameronmoll.com/articles/mobile/mkp/

Patrick Griffith’s Handheld Media Test Page (Test to see if handheld device interprets media=”handheld”):

http://htmldog.com/test/handheld.html

Good, General Mobile Web Testing Resources Available Here:

http://carsonified.com/blog/mobile/make-your-site-mobile-friendly/

Apple iPhone / iPad / iOS Resources

Apple iPhone Developer Center:

http://developer.apple.com/iphone/index.action

iUI Interface Library / Framework Documentation:

http://code.google.com/p/iui/

http://www.k10design.net/articles/iui/

iPhone Web HTML Application Home Screen Icons, Viewport Adjustments:

http://www.hanselman.com/blog/MakeYourWebsiteMobileAndIPhoneFriendlyAddHomeScreenIPhoneIconsAndAdjustTheViewPort.aspx

Touch Interface Detection:

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/2607248/optimize-website-for-touch-devices

iPad Orientation Detection CSS:

http://catharsis.tumblr.com/post/501657271/ipad-orientation-css-revised

http://www.cloudfour.com/ipad-orientation-css/

http://www.cloudfour.com/ipad-css/

Preparing Your Web Content for iPad:

http://developer.apple.com/safari/library/technotes/tn2010/tn2262.html

iPad CSS How To:

http://thomasmaier.me/2010/03/howto-css-for-the-ipad/

Building an iPhone App using jQTouch & PhoneGap, without Objective-C:

http://net.tutsplus.com/tutorials/html-css-techniques/the-easiest-way-to-build-your-first-iphone-app/

http://radar.oreilly.com/2010/01/ipad-opportunities-for-web-dev.html

http://oreilly.com/catalog/9780596805784/

Blackberry Developer Zone:

http://na.blackberry.com/eng/developers/

Blackberry Browsers Stylesheet and CSS Support Information:

http://docs.blackberry.com/en/developers/deliverables/11844/Feature_CSS_512751_11.jsp

How to target the Blackberry browser:

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/913040/how-to-target-the-blackberry-browser

Blackberry Device Simulators:

http://na.blackberry.com/eng/developers/resources/simulators.jsp

RIM Blackberry Developers Reference Guide: Blackberry Browser HTML, CSS and JS Information:

http://docs.blackberry.com/en/developers/subcategories/?userType=21&category=BlackBerry%20Browser

RIM Blackberry Browser CSS Reference Guide:

http://docs.blackberry.com/en/developers/deliverables/5683/CSS_Reference.pdf

RIM Blackberry Browser Content Design Guidelines:

http://docs.blackberry.com/en/developers/deliverables/4305/BlackBerry_Browser-4.6.0-US.pdf

In the BlackBerry Documentation for Developers, there is a documentation for the BlackBerry Browser, including CSS Reference – BlackBerry Browser. There is no specific mention of CSS3, but that document lists supported CSS properties.

There is also a BlackBerry Widget web standards support page that states 4.7.1 and 5.0 have partial support for CSS 3 color and full support for CSS 3 marquee, CSS 3 media queries, CSS 3 namespaces and CSS 3 selectors.

Opera Mini 5 Optimization:

http://dev.opera.com/articles/view/opera-mini-5-beta-developers/#optimizing

Opera Mini Browser-based Simulator:

http://www.opera.com/mobile/demo/

How to serve the right content to mobile browsers:

http://dev.opera.com/articles/view/how-to-serve-the-right-content-to-mobile/

W3C CCS3 Media Queries Specification:

http://www.w3.org/TR/css3-mediaqueries/

Mobile Device Support through JavaScript & CCS Media Queries:

http://floggingenglish.com/2009/06/18/mobile-device-support-through-javascript-and-css/

Safe Cross-Platform, Cross-Device Media Queries:

http://dev.opera.com/articles/view/safe-media-queries/

HTML & CSS For Mobiles:

http://www.htmldog.com/ptg/archives/000055.php

Mobile CSS is a reality:

http://www.htmldog.com/ptg/archives/000056.php

CSS Discuss: Handheld Style Sheets:

http://css-discuss.incutio.com/wiki/Handheld_Stylesheets

Mobile Style Guides:

http://patterns.design4mobile.com/index.php/Mobile_Style_Guides_-_Screen_Design,_Part_1

You can try acid3.acidtests.org and http://www.css3.info/selectors-test/test.html on the respective browsers to check some compatibility, but that may not be an exact determining factor of full compatibility. However I don’t think any of the mobile browsers currently fully support CSS3.

—————————-

Both iPhone and Android systems use WebKit as the rendering engine in their mobile browsers. I believe Blackberry are moving to Webkit as well at some point. This engine has some of the best support for parts of CSS 3 available at the moment, as well as quite a lot of proprietary extensions.

I would recommend researching what is available in WebKit, and then testing.

A great resource for support tables is http://www.quirksmode.org where PPK is doing more and more mobile browser testing to answer just these kind of questions.

http://www.russellbeattie.com/blog/css3-and-the-death-of-handheld-stylesheets

An Introduction to the Mobile Web:

http://dev.opera.com/articles/view/introduction-to-the-mobile-web/

The Mobile Phone Directory – Phone Specifications, Glossary of Terms:

http://www.mobile-phone-directory.org/

Mobile Web Glossary from the BBC:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/mobile/web/glossary.shtml?d

WURFL — Wireless Universal Resource File — (SourceForge):

http://wurfl.sourceforge.net/

WURFL API Intro:

http://wurfl.sourceforge.net/newapi/

WURFL Java API:

http://wurfl.sourceforge.net/njava/

Wikipedia Entry – Microbrowser:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microbrowser

Wikipedia Entry – Mobile Phone:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mobile_phone

Cameron Moll’s Mobile Web Design Series:

Part 1: http://www.cameronmoll.com/archives/000415.html

Part 2: http://www.cameronmoll.com/archives/000428.html

Part 3: http://www.cameronmoll.com/archives/000577.html

Making Small Devices Look Great:

http://dev.opera.com/articles/view/making-small-devices-look-great/

The Pros and Cons of Developing a Mobile Version of Your Website:

http://www.dirjournal.com/articles/mobile-search-the-pro-and-cons-of-developing-a-mobile-version-of-your-website/

Bulletproof Mobile Device Detection:

http://www.bushidodesigns.net/blog/mobile-device-detection-css-without-user-agent/

A List Apart: “Return of the Handheld Stylesheet”:

http://www.alistapart.com/articles/return-of-the-mobile-stylesheet

A List Apart: “Put Your Content in My Pocket” (iPhone information):

http://www.alistapart.com/articles/putyourcontentinmypocket/

A List Apart: “Understanding Progressive Enhancement”:

http://www.alistapart.com/articles/understandingprogressiveenhancement/

Progressive Enhancement for Mobile Media Queries:

http://www.iheni.com/progressive-enhancement-for-mobile-media-queries/

Server-Side Scripting for Bulk Mobile Site Page Re-engineering:

http://www.mikeindustries.com/blog/archive/2005/07/make-your-site-mobile-friendly

Mobile Browser / Mobile Web Usage Statistics

http://gs.statcounter.com/#mobile_browser-ww-monthly-200903-201004

http://www.upsdell.com/BrowserNews/stat_trends.htm

http://www.webdevelopersnotes.com/articles/mobile-web-browser-usage-statistics.php

http://developer.apple.com/safari/library/technotes/tn2010/tn2262.html

http://johannburkard.de/blog/www/mobile/mobile-browser-statistics-webkit-on-the-rise-opera-losing-share.html

http://moconews.net/article/419-the-top-mobile-browsers-are-not-what-you-think/

A Simple Introduction To HTML5 (regulargeek.com)
A non-Safari iPad? (telegraph.co.uk)
jQuery Mobile doubts (sunpig.com)
“Opera Mini 6 Lands on the iPad and the iPhone” and related posts (techie-buzz.com)
The Most Important Parts of HTML5 (n01se.net)
13 Helpful Mobile Web Design Tools & Resources (thenextweb.com)

Want to know more?

About the author.

I’m Paul Seibert, Editor of Boston’s Hub Tech Insider, a Boston focused technology blog. I have been working in the software engineering and ecommerce industries for over fifteen years. My interests include computers, electronics, robotics and programmable microcontrollers, and I am an avid outdoorsman and guitar player. You can connect with me on LinkedIn, follow me on Twitter, follow me on Quora, even friend me on Facebook if you’re cool. I own and am trying to sell a dual-zoned, residential & commercial Office Building in Natick, MA. I have a background in entrepreneurship, ecommerce, telecommunications and software development, I’m a Technical PMO Director, I’m a serial entrepreneur and the co-founder of several ecommerce and web-based software startups, the latest of which are Twitterminers.com and Tshirtnow.net.

What are some good books on User Interface design? How do you define user interfaces in your software specification documents? The Hub Tech Insider User Interface Design Bookshelf July 31, 2011

Posted by HubTechInsider in Agile Software Development, Ecommerce, Mobile Software Applications, Product Management, Project Management, Social Media, Software, Uncategorized.
Tags: Information Architects, Luke Wroblewski, Microsoft Visio, Om Malik, product management, Project Management, Project manager, Rich Internet Application, User Experience, User interface, User interface design
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The Hub Tech Insider User Interface Design Bookshelf: Essential UI Design Books for IT Directors, Project Managers, Program Managers, Software Requirements Engineers, Business Analysts, User Interface Designers, Graphic Designers, Interaction Designers and Information Architects.

Some of the tools that I typically use to produce wireframes and mockups to specify software that is under development include traditional desktop personal computer graphics application software packages such as Adobe Illustrator and Photoshop, business graphics and diagramming packages such as Microsoft Visio, and many others, including some on the Mac OS X and Linux platforms.

But no matter which software program you use to prepare your wireframes and mockups, you still need to have the knowledge surrounding what types of controls are available, and the wisdom to know the most apropos situations in which to use those software controls.

It may be surprising to many people that are not involved in the software industry, but it is not always system and application software programmers who are the most familiar with these types of user interface interactivity patterns and controls. User interface designers, graphic designers, and information and interaction architects are usually the ones who specify these types of “Web 2.0” controls.

If you are writing software specification documents, I recommend that you become as familiar as possible with all of the different types of rich internet application controls and interaction patterns that are examined in detail within these books. Programmers and project and program managers will benefit as well.

A great amount of time and effort will be saved if everyone on the project team has familiarity with these fundamental web interface and interaction patterns. Having a common vocabulary with which to communicate to each other in design and development meetings will pay dividends throughout the course of the software development lifecycle.

The ability to suggest an interaction pattern or a type of control that can preserve screen or page real estate, for instance, can make the critical difference in getting a software system design specified in a limited amount of time. Having knowledge of user interface best practices and common user interaction patterns in-house, on the project team itself, can not only save money in avoidance of expensive user interface consultants and UI design firms, but it can also ensure that the tricky question of post-implementation compliance amongst your development team and programming staff.

I have compiled a list of books that in my opinion merit a place on any professional user interface designer’s bookshelf. If you are looking to stock your User Interface library, you really can’t go wrong with this list of books.

I feel that IT Directors, Product Managers, Program Managers and Project Managers, as well as Graphic Designers, Information Architects, and Interaction Designers and Usability Engineers (read this article if you need help understanding what these job titles mean) could all benefit from reading several or all of these books.

I have found in my professional career that having advanced knowledge of User Interface design techniques and best practices aids me greatly in producing high quality project plans and functional specifications for web based applications and their related software development projects. Mockups and wireframes that incorporate the various design patterns outlined in these books have greatly increased my ability to communicate and develop project related deliverables and artifacts for complex and cutting edge user interfaces, particularly those that include social media platform integrations and RIA, or Rich Internet Application, frontends.

The more knowledge that you acquire in your professional career on a software development team, and the more you know about user interfaces for web based applications, the more value you will be capable of delivering to both your employer and yourself in the form of expanded career opportunities.

Web Form Design: Filling in the Blanks

By Luke Wroblewski. Rosenfeld Media, May 2008.

Web Form Design: Filling in the blanks, by Luke Wroblewski

Anyone who designs anything for the web needs a copy of this. It makes it so nice to not have to think about designing forms. I can spend my time on more interesting design challenges. This book doesn’t leave my desk.

Forms make or break the most crucial online interactions: checkout, registration, and any task requiring information entry. In this book, Luke Wroblewski draws on original research, his considerable experience at Yahoo! and eBay, and the perspectives of many of the field’s leading designers to show you everything you need to know about designing effective and engaging web forms.

I have found this book to be the most practical, comprehensive and data-driven guide for solving form design challenges and I consider it an essential reference.

The Smashing Book #1

The Smashing Book #1

This book is available exclusively from Smashing Magazine. This book looks at Web design rules of thumb, color theory, usability guidelines, user interface design, best coding and optimization practices, as well as typography, marketing, branding and exclusive insights from top designers across the globe.

This book contains ten carefully prepared, written and edited stories that are based upon topic suggestions and wishes of Smashing Magazine’s readers. The topics covered here are fundamental and so the content is highly practical.

The Smashing Book #2

Smashing Book #2 (eBook) + The Lost Files

The Smashing Book #2

This book shares valuable practical insight into design, usability and coding. It provides professional advice for designing mobile applications and building successful e-commerce websites, and it explains common coding mistakes and how to avoid them. You’ll explore the principles of professional design thinking and graphic design and learn how to apply psychology and game theory to create engaging user experiences.

Designing Web Interfaces: Principles and Patterns for Rich Interactions

By Bill Scott & Theresa Neil

Want to learn how to create great user experiences on today’s web? In this book, UI experts Bill Scott and Theresa Neil present more than 75 design patterns for building great web interfaces that provide interaction. Distilled from the author’s years of experience at Sabre, Yahoo!, and Netflix, these best practices are grouped into six key principles to help you take advantage of the web technologies available today. With an entire section devoted to each design principle, Designing Web Interfaces illustrates many patterns with full-color examples from working websites. If you need to build or renovate a website to be truly interactive, this book will give you the principles for success.

Don’t Make Me Think: A Common Sense Approach to Web Usability, 2nd Edition

by Steve Krug

Five years and more than 100,000 copies after it was first published, it is very difficult to imagine anyone working in web development or design that has not read this classic on web usability, but people are still discovering it every day. In this second edition, Steve adds three new chapters in the same style as the original: wry and entertaining, yet loaded with insights and practical advice for novice and veteran alike. Don’t be surprised if it completely changes the way you think about web design.

The three new chapters are entitled: Usability as common courtesy (why people really leave web sites), Web accessibility, CSS, and you (making sites usable and accessible), and Help! My boss wants me to ______. (Surviving executive design whims).

In this second edition, Steve adds essential ammunition for those whose bosses, clients, stakeholders, and marketing managers insist on doing the wrong thing. If you design, write, program, own, or manage web sites, you must read this book.

Rocket Surgery Made Easy: The Do-It-Yourself Guide to Finding and Fixing Usability Problems

It’s been known for years that usability testing can dramatically improve products. But with a typical price tag of $5,000 to $10,000 for a usability consultant to conduct each round of tests, it rarely happens.

In this how-to companion to Don’t Make Me Think: A Common Sense Approach to Web Usability, Steve Krug spells out an approach to usability testing that anyone can easily apply to their own web site, application, or other product. (As he said in Don’t Make Me Think, “It’s not rocket surgery”.)

Information Architecture for the World Wide Web: Designing Large-Scale Web Sites

Saul Wurman first used the term Information Architecture in his book of the same name. His book was mostly lots of really pretty pictures of media and webs compiled from a graphic design perspective; they were beautiful but never really dealt with the information end of things. Rosenfeld and Morville get it right. They show how to design manageable sites right the first time, sites built for growth. They discuss ideas of organization, navigation, labeling, searching, research, and conceptual design. This is almost common sense, which is often overlooked in the rush for cascading style sheets and XML.

The Elements of User Experience: User-Centered Design for the Web

From the moment it was published almost ten years ago, Elements of User Experience became a vital reference for web and interaction designers the world over, and has come to define the core principles of the practice. Now, in this updated, expanded, and full-color new edition, Jesse James Garrett has refined his thinking about the Web, going beyond the desktop to include information that also applies to the sudden proliferation of mobile devices and applications.

Successful interaction design requires more than just creating clean code and sharp graphics. You must also fulfill your strategic objectives while meeting the needs of your users. Even the best content and the most sophisticated technology won’t help you balance those goals without a cohesive, consistent user experience to support it.

With so many issues involved—usability, brand identity, information architecture, interaction design— creating the user experience can be overwhelmingly complex. This new edition of The Elements of User Experience cuts through that complexity with clear explanations and vivid illustrations that focus on ideas rather than tools or techniques. Garrett gives readers the big picture of user experience development, from strategy and requirements to information architecture and visual design.

Forms that Work: Designing Web Forms for Usability

by Caroline Jarrett and Gerry Gaffney

Forms are everywhere on the web – used for registration and communicating, for commerce and government alike. Good forms make for happier customers, better data, and reduced support costs. Bad forms fill your organization’s databases with inaccuracies and duplicates and can cause the loss of potential or current customers. This book isn’t about just colons and choosing the right widgets. It’s about the entire process of making good forms, which has a lot more to do with making sure you’re asking the right questions and in such a way that your users can answer than it does with whether you use a drop-down list or radio buttons.

If your web site includes forms, then you need to read this book. In an easy-to-red format with lots of examples, Caroline Jarrett, who runs the usability consulting company Effortmark Ltd.(http://www.usabilitynews.com), and Gerry Gaffney, who runs the usability consulting company Information & Design Proprietary Ltd.(http://www.uxpod.com), present their three layer model – appearance, conversation, and relationship. You need all three for a successful form – a form that looks good, flows well, asks the right questions in the right way, and most importantly, gets users to fill it out.

Designing good forms is trickier than people think. This book explains exactly how to design great forms for the web. Liberally illustrated with full-color examples, it guides readers through how to define and gather requirements to how to write questions that users will understand and want to answer, as well as how to deal with instructions, progress indicators, and error conditions.

I found that this book provides proven and practical advice that will help designers avoid pitfalls, and produce forms that are aesthetically pleasing, efficient, and cost-effective.

The book is filled with invaluable design methods and tips to help ensure accurate data and satisfied customers, and includes dozens of examples, from nitty-gritty details (label alignment, mandatory fields) to visual design (creating good grids, use of color).

Defensive Design for the Web: How to improve error messages, help, forms, and other crisis points

by Matthew Linderman and Jason Fried

Let the 37signals team show you the best way to prevent your customers from making mistakes, and help them recover for errors if a mistake does occur. This book doesn’t leave my desk either.

The folks at 37signals have created an invaluable resource: tons of ‘best practice’ examples for ensuring that web users can recover gracefully when things – as they inevitably will – go ‘worng’ !

In this book, you will learn 40 guidelines to prevent errors and rescue customers if a breakdown does occur. You will see hundreds of real-world examples from companies like Amazon and Google that show the right (and wrong) ways to handle crisis points.

You can also use this book to evaluate your own site’s defensive design with an easy-to-perform test and find out how to improve your site over the long term.

About Face 3: The Essentials of Interaction Design

By Alan Cooper. Wiley 2007.

About Face 3, by Alan Cooper

Learn the rules before you break them. Please. Pretty please with a cherry on top? Get this book and read it if you are responsible for designing anything more than a simple web site. Good for Flex developers and Ajax developers as well. Lots of patterns that can be extrapolated for Rich Internet Applications.

Prototyping: A Practitioner’s Guide

Prototyping: A Practitioner’s Guide” is a terrific and comprehensive review of both the prototyping process and the tools involved. There’s really very little with which to find fault. I found that the book both validated my experience in prototyping and provided new techniques to try out, with many “Aha!” moments in both respects. The inclusion of case studies illustrating the techniques provide additional perspective and make the techniques more “real”. The review of each prototyping technique/tool, whether paper or software-based, includes links to additional resources like toolkits, sample images, and the like – these would be especially useful to someone just getting started with a particular tool. Speaking as a designer who’s typically relied on HTML prototypes and Visio, I must say my interest in Adobe Fireworks and, to a lesser extent, Axure is piqued. I think any UI/UX/IX designer, of any level of experience, would get something out of this book. Not that it would be useful only to them – analysts and software engineers will benefit from it as well.

Want to know more?

About the author.

I’m Paul Seibert, Editor of Boston’s Hub Tech Insider, a Boston focused technology blog. I have been working in the software engineering and ecommerce industries for over fifteen years. My interests include computers, electronics, robotics and programmable microcontrollers, and I am an avid outdoorsman and guitar player. You can connect with me on LinkedIn, follow me on Twitter, follow me on Quora, even friend me on Facebook if you’re cool. I own and am trying to sell a dual-zoned, residential & commercial Office Building in Natick, MA. I have a background in entrepreneurship, ecommerce, telecommunications and software development, I’m a Technical PMO Director, I’m a serial entrepreneur and the co-founder of several ecommerce and web-based software startups, the latest of which are Twitterminers.com and Tshirtnow.net.

How do you write software requirements? What are software requirements? What is a software requirement? July 28, 2011

Posted by HubTechInsider in Project Management.
Tags: Agile Software Development, product management, Project Management, Project manager, Requirement, Software Development, Software development process, Software Engineering, Software Requirements Specification
1 comment so far

Image via Wikipedia

What is a software requirement?

A software requirement, simply stated, is something that matters to someone who matters.

A software requirement may take the form of anything from a high-level, abstract statement of a service or constraint to a detailed, formal specification. Software requirements must serve many purposes during the software engineering process, and so this is the reason that there is so much variation in how they are written and presented.

My main approach to writing requirements can vary in format from project to project, but I tend to prepare a list of software requirements in a computer spreadsheet program like Microsoft Excel or Google Docs, or Open Office Spreadsheet. This requirements document is always dated, ranked, the source of the requirements is always noted for traceability, and it is usually accompanied and supplemented by a catalog of use cases and a functional specification document with mockups and wireframes.

What are the characteristics of good software requirements?

The IEEE has a standard, IEEE 830, that lays out the characteristics according to the IEEE of good software requirements:

1. Correct: The SRS, or software requirements specification, should correctly describe the system behavior. It is not productive to have a requirements document that describes implausible or impossible expected system behavior or user goals.

2. Unambiguous: Software requirements should be written in such a manner as they are not subject to different interpretations. The use of specific and appropriate language can help avoid ambiguity in interpretation.

3. Complete: the software requirements document should completely describe the system’s expected behaviors and feature set.

4. Consistent: Requirements for the system under discussion must not contradict each other.

5. Ranked: You must rank your software requirements for importance. Each software requirement has its own level of importance and criticality, and they are not all equal. By ranking the requirements, software designers ensure that guidance is given to the development team regarding effective prioritization.

6. Verifiable: If the requirement cannot be verified as having been met, then the requirement itself is written poorly. The requirements have to be testable.

7. Modifiable: The requirements must be easy to modify or change.

8. Traceable: The requirements must be traceable, and it is essential that traceability information has been provided, as the requirements document provides the starting point in the traceability chain. I have written elsewhere in this blog at length about the importance of software requirements traceability and have provided examples of software requirement traceability matrixes. Many software development organizations use proprietary CASE software tools and other methods to enforce traceability policies that stipulate how much traceability information regarding requirements must be maintained.

What are some wording and language best practices for software requirements?

I have many years of hard won expertise in writing software requirements. About this topic I have discovered many tips and tricks of the trade that can serve you well as excellent best practices. I suggest that you invent and use a standard format for all of your requirements and requirements documents, including use cases and functional specifications. You should take great care to use language in a consistent way when writing your software requirements.

I recommend that you use “Shall” when you are writing mandatory software requirements, such as “The system shall provide a facility for a store manager to enter an alternate shipping address onto the order confirmation page”.

I recommend that you use “Should” for desireable software requirements, such as “The system should enable the use of as many payment gateways as have been configured by engineering prior to the current release”.

Feel free to boldface or otherwise emphasize or highlight key parts of the requirement. This holds true for use cases ad functional specification documents as well.

I recommend that unless it is absolutely necessary, you should avoid technical language or implementation details in your requirements documents.

What do bad software requirements look like?

What makes software requirements “Bad” software requirements? Well, lack of specificity is one way requirements can be reckoned to be poor. Another way in which software requirements can fail to serve their purpose in the software development effort is when they are written in a way in which they are they are not verifiable. If, for instance, a software requirements engineer were to write a software requirement in which he or she stated the system under discussion was to be “completely reliable”, what exactly would they mean, and how would “reliable” be quantified? If a percentage is used in the writing of a software requirement, the whole or the baseline percentage and boundaries should be specified.

The following are some examples of very poor software requirements — you really don’t want to write software requirements which look like these, trust me:

“The system shall be completely reliable”

“The system shall be maintainable”

“Order rejections shall be less than 99%”

“The system shall be fast”

“The system should use artificial intelligence”

“The system should be totally modular”

What do good software requirements look like?

I have already mentioned IEEE standard 830, which can serve as a fundamental basis guide for you when you set out to write your own software requirements, but let me emphasize a few key points here before setting some example good software requirements before you.

Make sure that your requirements are traceable, verifiable, and specific. Ensure that when you write your software requirements that you quantify any specific qualities that you write about as desireable User goals or User Stories. Make sure you rank your requirements for software development and date them, notating the source of the requirement, the venue of the requirement’s origin, the primary internal and external stakeholders, and the DRI, or directly responsible individual, who is assigned to sheparding that requirement through development. Make sure that you use “Shall” for mandatory requirements and “Should” for optional, or “nice to have” requirements.

“The response time for the system to present the checkout page upon an order button click on a product detail page shall be less than 500ms”

“95% of all transactions on the public-facing webstore portal shall be processed in less than 4s”

“MTBF for the domain controller server shall be 5000 hours of continuous operation”

“The system shall present the closest 5 stores to the user on the map page, provided that 5 stores are within the user-defined search radius”

How do you rank software requirements?

For the most part, I generally advocate a three level rating system for software requirements: mandatory, desirable, and optional. The mandatory requirements cannot be sacrificed, desirable requirements are important but could be sacrificed if necessary to meet schedule or budgetary concerns. Optional requirements are ones which may not be developed, simply due to the fact that they have been rated as being “nice to have”.

Ranking of software requirements comes in handy when the development team needs to make tradeoffs. For example, if time or work force is limited, the development team’s focus can then be placed on the higher ranked requirements.

What is the role of the requirements document in the software development process?

The requirements document is the official statement of what is required of the system developers. The requirements document should include both a definition and a specification of requirements. However, the requirements document is not a design document. To the extent that it is possible, the requirements document should be a set of statements regarding what the system should do, not how it should do it. In the real world, the requirements document does tend to contain some design specifications, which can box in the programmers later if carried too far.

Precise software specifications provide the fundamentals for analyzing the requirements, validating that they are the stakeholder’s intentions, defining what the designers have to build, and verifying that they have done so correctly.

Requirements allow the system’s programmers and software engineers to know the motivation for development of the system under construction. Software requirements also help the engineers manage the process of evolving the software over time and across suites of related software products and web-based services.

Who typically uses software requirements documents?

There are a great variety of stakeholders, both internal and external, who utilize the requirements documents throughout a typical software development project lifecycle. Each of these stakeholders will have a different perspective on the requirements document and they will each put the requirements document to a different use:

1. Customers or clients: will desire to, as completely as possible, express how their needs can be met. They continue to do this throughout the software development lifecycle process as their perceptions of their own needs change.

2. Developers or programmers: will attempt to create a software design that will satisfy all of the requirements laid out by the system designers.

3. QA personnel and testers: will use the requirements document as a basis for writing and conducting the tests they will use to verify that the system functions as it was designed.

4. Managers and project leaders: will use the requirements document as a contract to bid upon the system and then control the production of the software throughout the software development lifecycle.

5. System and Maintenance engineers: will use the requirements document as evidence of what the designers of the system had originally intended for it to do, using this as a guide for continuing evolution and maintenance efforts.

What is software requirements engineering?

Software requirements engineering is a subset or subdiscipline of software engineering that is focused on determining and specifying the functions, constraints, and user goals of the software system being designed.

The software requirements engineering process begins with a discovery project or feasibility study which leads to a discovery project findings document or project feasability report. There are instances, rare though they may be, when a software development project feasability study will actually conclude that the best course of action for a development organization is to not move forward with the development project. Feasibility studies can help your discovery team uncover answers to questions such as these:

1. Is a new technology needed for us to develop the system under discussion? What expenses will be involved in acquiring this new technology or resources experienced in working with it?

2. What is the impact, in all aspects, of not constructing the proposed system?

3. What are the current problems the system under discussion is proposed to alleviate?

4. How will the proposed system allievated these concerns?

5. What will be some of the development and integration problems encountered by the system’s design and programming project teams?

Software requirements engineering is strongly influenced by computer science and systems engineering, however, as developing software is an art, not a science, and since developing software is a human endeavor not generally considered a “true” engineering discipline, software requirements engineering draws upon a number of different disciplines and fields of study. Particularly with respect to understanding the user goals and needs and desires of humans, individuals with a diverse background in anthropolgy, philosophy, cognitive psychology, linguistics and other liberal arts fields often make superb requirements elicitators and software requirements engineers. It is oftentimes business analysts who take the fore in requirements elicitation and gathering in many organizations.

Software requirements engineering for a software development project has a few typical phases:

1. Requirements elicitation and gathering is always a necessary step, as frequently primary internal and external project stakeholders do not know what they want, the requirements can be deeply “hidden” within a client organization, prior requirements may not be validated or verifiable, and even completely incorrect. This is the phase of the project which will largely determine the success or failure of the project.

2. Requirements modeling is a way in which the written, prose requirements are presented in another format. Although effectively doing this can prove difficult for novices, many techniques such as use case modeling, UML diagrams, user stories and user goals can help system designers and requirements engineers and business analysts represent the requirements in a more easily comprehensible or shareable form.

3. Analyzing requirements is the process whereby the requirements are checked for consistency, correctness, completeness, sufficient detail, and writing style and format.

4. Requirements change management is a requisite activity for business analysts and software requirements engineers, as requirements are changing all the time and this process is to be expected and prepared for.

What different types of software requirements are there?

Even though there are many different types of forms software requirements may take, in my own experience a requirements document may encorporate a few different types of requirements within the same document, sometimes subdivided into sections or categorized. I wanted to take some time to explain a little about each of the types of software requirements so that when you are discussing requirements with stakeholders internal and external, as well as your project team, you can more easily express what you mean in terms of what type of requirements and for what purpose you wish to write them.

There is quite a bit of overlap in the functions of each of the types of software requirements I’m about to discuss. Keep this in mind, and remember that one of the points of this excercise is to familiarize yourself with the lingo. Knowing what each of these terms for software requirements refers to can help you forget about classifying your requirements and instead focus on just getting the requirements down on paper (or rather into your computer spreadsheet program or requirements management database) quickly.

1. Functional requirements are generally written from a bird’s-eye viewpoint, or at a high level, although they can also be very detailed, and contain annotations and notes, as well as references to other materials such as screen and page mockups and flow diagrams. They can describe not only what the system under construction should do, but also what it should not do.

2. Nonfunctional requirements are boundary conditions or externalities to the system under construction which will effect the performance envelope or capabilities of the system once it is operation. These types of requirements may include things such as environmental constraints, compliance with federal and state laws or industry regulations, safety standards, timing constraints, quality or uptime properties, programming languages to be used, etc.

3. Design constraint requirements include nonfunctional requirements that relate to hardware limitations and industry standards compliance.

4. Logical database requirements include things such as required data models or database schemas, data entity relationship diagrams (ERDs) stipulating database requirements, data entities and their required relationships, data retention and data integrity constraints, as well as database requirements that specify data access frequency of use data and accessing capabilities.

5. Domain requirements are a type of nonfunctional requirement which has been dictated to the system designers by the application’s domain of operation. For example, a health care application software system may have data integrity and security domain requirements which are derived from the HIPAA health care industry standards regarding private health care information (PHI). Domain requirements may impose new functional requirements or boundary conditions on existing requirements.

6. System attribute requirements are functional requirements which include information regarding the desired system availability, reliability, maintainability, portability and security.

7. Interface specifications are yet another type of functional requirements for software systems which are defined in terms of specifying how the system should interoperate with other software systems. There are many types of formalized notation systems used to specify these types of interfaces, including UML, or unified modeling language diagrams. The interface specifications focus on defining the data entities to be exchanged with other software systems, their structures and representations, as well as defining the interfaces themselves.

7. Performance requirements quantify the desired performance of the system being constructed. Performance requirements are a type of functional requirement, and there are two major types of performance requirements, those that measure or stipulate the performance of static system objects, processes or events, and those that stipulate the performance of dynamic system objects, processes or events. Performance requirements for software system generally take the form of numerically expressed time constraints. A software system’s static performance requirements might include things such as the number of simultaneous users the system would need to support at any given moment of time, whereby a system’s dynamic performance requirements might include such constraints as the number of work orders that would need to be processed by the system within certain time periods for both normal and peak workload conditions.

How are software requirements validated?

It is important to ensure that the requirements for the software system under construction accurately represent not only what the software developers and programmers are building, but also what the customer or client originally desired. Validation is very important, as catching requirement errors early on in the software development lifecycle reduces expense greatly. Rectifying a requirements error after delivery may cost up to 100 times the cost of fixing an implementation error.

The IEEE has developed another standard, IEEE 830, for best practices for validating software requirements. The IEEE 830 standard lays out some suggested process improvements and gateways, including:

1. Requirements reviews.

2. Manual systematic analysis of the requirements.

3. Software prototyping.

4. Using an executable model of the system in order to verify the requirements.

5. Test case generation.

6. Developing test cases from the requirements in order to validate that they are in fact testable and verifiable requirements as written.

7. Automated consistency analysis.

What is software requirements modeling?

There are a number of different techniques which can be used to model software requirements. Some of these software requirements modeling techniques I have discussed at length elsewhere in this hub tech insider blog, and some of the other techniques for modeling requirements I will explore in more detail within these pages in future articles. User stories, user goals, use cases, and UML diagrams are some of the techniques oftentimes used to model software requirements, but there are many others including formal methods, natural languages, and structured diagrams.

The reason that modeling techniques are used in addition to prose requirements is that English, or any other natural language, inherently adds difficulty to the process of communicating requirements for the poduction of software. These difficulties can include lack of precision and clarity of language to the improper mixing of functional and nonfunctional requirements. The needless overcomplexity of combining requirements until they no longer make sense, in a wierd amalgamation of needs, is a common problem, as is ambiguity of language.

How do you conduct a requirements elicitation and gathering session?

There are many common problems encountered when elicitating requirements for a software system to be constructed. Requirements elicitation is a process in which requirements engineers or business analysts work with customers in order to determine the proposed system’s operational constraints, services, and application scope. There are many people involved in most requirements elicitation and gathering phases of a software development project, and they are collectively known as project stakeholders. Project stakeholders may include domain experts, managers, engineers, end users, and other internal and external personnel.

One of the primary concerns of the requirements engineer is eliciting requirements from stakeholders who are not sure what it is they really want from the system under discussion. Stakeholders can in fact introduce many serious detrimental issues into the requirements gathering and elicitation process that you should be aware of. These can include expressing requirements in their own, often incorrect terminology, providing conflicting requirements, and the introduction by stakeholders of organizational politics and other bureaucratic externalities which may unduly influence the requirements. It is not at all uncommon for stakeholders to feel free to change the requirements at will in response to new stakeholders who may emerge mid-project, as well as shifting business environments. All of these detrimental factors must be carefully monitored and counteracted by the requirements engineer when necessary.

Want to know more?

About the author.

I’m Paul Seibert, Editor of Boston’s Hub Tech Insider, a Boston focused technology blog. I have been working in the software engineering and ecommerce industries for over fifteen years. My interests include computers, electronics, robotics and programmable microcontrollers, and I am an avid outdoorsman and guitar player. You can connect with me on LinkedIn, follow me on Twitter, follow me on Quora, even friend me on Facebook if you’re cool. I own and am trying to sell a dual-zoned, residential & commercial Office Building in Natick, MA. I have a background in entrepreneurship, ecommerce, telecommunications and software development, I’m a PMO Director, I’m a serial entrepreneur and the co-founder of several ecommerce and web-based software startups, the latest of which is Tshirtnow.net.

How do you create a Competitive Analysis? What is a competitive analysis? July 24, 2011

Posted by HubTechInsider in Product Management, Project Management.
Tags: agile development, Agile Software Development, Competitive Analysis, Competitor analysis, Consulting, Edward Tufte, Positioning, product management, product roadmap, Project Management, Software Development, Software Engineering
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How do you create a Competitive Analysis document? What is a competitive analysis?

Competitive analysis documents can be found as a primary product management deliverable in most every industry, and even the simplest competitive analysis document displays two critical dimensions: the competitors and the criteria, or the competitive framework. The purpose of the competitive framework is to present the analysis data in a way that makes it easy to compare the various products, companies, or services across the different marketplace features or comparative criteria.

Elements of an effective competitive anlysis

Competitive analyses vary along two dimensions: competitors and criteria, and so it is common for most competitive analysis documents to provide a visual mechanism for representing two or more products or services side-by-side with the differences showcased. The specific nature of those differences will vary depending on the competitive criteria the analysis author has selected. These competitive anlysis documents can vary in size, with some much longer than others because they their authors have elected to highlight more product features or more marketplace competitors on the analysis document.

“Two-by-two” competitive analysis plot

Every competitive analysis document shares three essential elements: a purpose statement, the competitive framework, which is the competitors and the criteria, and the comparative data. The analysis document may also provide more details about the overall products, the competitors and their market positioning, or the method behind the comparative analysis results.

The purpose of the competitive framework is to present the data in such a manner as to make it easy for a reader or viewer to compare the products or service offerings across the different comparative criteria.

When the competitive framework takes the form of a table, the competitors or products can run along the top of the table and the comparative criteria along the side. The criteria can vary from the very general to the very specific.

A typical table competitive analysis

A different kind of competitive framework is known in MBA programs as the “two-by-two” graph or plot. The “two-by-two” plots competitors or products on a simple grid depicting only two comparative criteria.

In a two-by-two competitive framework, the number of criteria is down to two, so the analysis tends to be much broader than a traditional competitive framework. The “two-by-two” competitive framework is excellent at turning subjective information into objective information. Although it is technically possible for a “two-by-two” competitive analysis author to use real numbers and actually plot along the scale, most two-by-two presentations are ideal for very broad criteria that might not lend themselves to hard numbers. This type of plot is useful to help identify holes in a market or competitive landscape. Competitors that are clustered around certain areas of the two-by-two plot may indicate that there are opportunities for a competitive product or service to fill those vacuums.

A “two-by-two” competitive analysis plot

Some research organizations use a modified version of the “two-by-two” plot format. Sometimes you may see competitors plotted out on a single square, with “waves” or “bands” of features, strategies, or market postions illustrated as areas of the single square. This format is equally effective, and it has the advantage of being an excellent format for the creation of a catalog of different one square competive analysis plots, one for each area of focus within the competitive landscape. So you could for instance have a single square plot for market positioning, one for revenue or scale of business, one for pltting out competitors’ different revenue situations, etc.

An example of a “wave” or “band” single-square plot

Yet another competitive framework that appears in competitive analysis documents and especially comparisons of different sites or user interfaces: the “small multiples”. This term was coined by information architect and data visualization guru Edward Tufte. In Tufte’s “The Visual Display of Quantitative Information”, he states, “Small multiples represent the frames of a movie: a series of graphics, showing the same combination of variables, indexed by changes in another variable.” In other words, “small multiples” are a series of graphics that allow the viewer to easily compare similar sets of information. In the case of user interface design or information architecture for the web, or graphics design for print or interactive media, this approach is most effective for comparing online and offline page layouts or interactive storyboards.

“Small multiples” chart comparing web site detail pages

Sometimes a competitive analysis will take the form of a table, with various stages of detail added as comparative criteria for each competive category. Great care should be taken by the author of the competitive analysis document that the length of the analysis does not become too unwieldy. Consider breaking up long competitive analysis documents into sections or categories.

Try to use as many graphic elements as possible in your competitive analysis documents. Graphs, charts, plots and tables are all excellent ways to present your competitve analysis data, and you should leverage these artifacts into your presentations and marketing communications.

The data is of paramount importance in a competitive analysis. The data can be as simple as yes-no values, indicating whether a product or service or competitor meets a particular criterion, or it can be descriptive, going into some detail for each criterion.

Yes-No values are a very common way to provide differentiating data in a competitive analysis. You’ve seen these kinds of competitive analyses on infomercials where the product in question is lined up with “other leading brands.” For each feature, the product gets a check mark while its competitors get an X, to show you how versatile the product is.

Feature comparison table

Spelling out your process can help address any possible methodological inadequacies. You might want to spend some time in a section of your competitive analysis document rationalizing the selection of competitors and criteria to increase the impact and veracity of your conclusions.

Explanation of a competitive analysis methodology

Competitive Intelligence Tips (blogs.vinuthomas.com)
Writing a Competitive Analysis For A Proposal (xemion.com)
Competitive Analysis in Under 60 Seconds Using Google Docs (seomoz.org)

Want to know more?

About the author.

I’m Paul Seibert, Editor of Boston’s Hub Tech Insider, a Boston focused technology blog. I have been working in the software engineering and ecommerce industries for over fifteen years. My interests include computers, electronics, robotics and programmable microcontrollers, and I am an avid outdoorsman and guitar player. You can connect with me on LinkedIn, follow me on Twitter, follow me on Quora, even friend me on Facebook if you’re cool. I own and am trying to sell a dual-zoned, residential & commercial Office Building in Natick, MA. I have a background in entrepreneurship, ecommerce, telecommunications and software development, I’m a PMO Director, I’m a serial entrepreneur and the co-founder of several ecommerce and web-based software startups, the latest of which is Tshirtnow.net.

What is a Product Roadmap? What is an Engineering Roadmap? July 21, 2011

Posted by HubTechInsider in Agile Software Development, Project Management.
Tags: Agile Software Development, Microsoft Visio, product management, product roadmap, Project Management, Software Development, Software Engineering, Technology roadmap
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English: Five-Year Technology Roadmap (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

What is a Product Roadmap? What is an Engineering Roadmap?

Product roadmaps can provide an organization, particularly a software development one, with the critical difference between success and failure when marketing and delivering software, services, or products to the marketplace.

While normally the purview of a product manager or director, another senior manager (project, program) or executive can also be charged with preparing and presenting a product or engineering roadmap, and when prepared properly, they can be extremely effective.

The benefits of roadmaps can include retention of key customers, business and channel partners, and engineering and product roadmaps can ably guide the strategic planning and engineering efforts of a company.

As amazing it may sound, I have frequently encountered, within the development organizations I have worked at within the Boston area, a lack of types of artifacts I am about to describe. The lack of product and engineering roadmaps that are accessible to viewers, easy for presenters to use in their slide decks and demos, and visually compelling enough and understandable enough so that audiences can grip the feature sets and timelines shown to them is a major cause of planning and project failure.

It is easy to visualize, once we have gone into a bit more detail regarding the different types of product and engineering roadmaps, how project and product planning attempts at companies without these types of deliverables (or the in-house skillset required to even prepare such artifacts) fail miserably. Computer programmers are not the best resources, in general, to call upon to produce these types of artifacts, nor are engineers who have been promoted to management positions. Typically the best preparers of roadmap documents will be from the business or management world, or have a diverse skillset that may be based in engineering, but you definitely need people who can generate business documents quickly and effectively.

Having folks that are knowledgable and skilled with graphic design programs like adobe photoshop, Illustrator, and microsoft visio can speed the roadmap creation process tremendously. When you have found the right internal resource or team to create these roadmap documents, you will know it, as the right people will already possess some amount of experience with roadmap and business strategy content creation.

It is not enough, please keep in mind, for a company to “short shift” the production of these roadmap documents, because it is only through the repeated creation of roadmap documents, and through their constant updating and presenting to audiences internal and external, will your organization be able to increase its ability to produce roadmap documents quickly.

A complete catalog of engineering and product roadmap documents should be created: eventually. If your company cannot mount such a concerted document creation efforts due to staffing concerns, just create what you can. Cherry pick the type of roadmap document you think would create the most value for your own organizational requirements from my detailed list below.

An example of a roadmap from Microsoft

It could very well be that your organization’s needs for a roadmap document are clouded by the sales department or company management demanding an engineering or product roadmap (sometimes in support of sales efforts) under-the-gun. Never fear: I have not only provided the information you need, I have lots of examples and pictures of product and engineering roadmaps as well as Microsoft visio and excel templates for simple and complex roadmap documents. You can use these microsoft excel product roadmap template and microsoft visio product roadmap templates to create your product or engineering roadmap quickly, avoiding trouble just when you’re getting started.

If you are a product management professional, and you are tasked with the responsibility for the ultimate success of a product line or engineering effort for your company, it is of paramount importance that you produce a roadmap document that can drive strategy, provide a clear idea of where you are headed with your efforts or product(s), and can be shared easily with internal and external stakeholders and business partners and analysts, even the press.

A product or engineering roadmap document may be appropriate when you are called upon to support a pre-sales or sales effort for your organization. Demos, presentations, press releases, investor and business meetings are all very good occasions for product or engineering roadmaps to assure clients, partners, and employees that there is a consistent and cogent plan of action and guide for resource planning and engineering efforts.

There is a wide variety of different names and definitions for all manner of roadmap documents. The important principle to adhere to is you should find and adapt the type of roadmap document you are comfortable with and that you find works for you.

What are the different types of product roadmaps? What are the different types of engineering roadmaps?

Speaking generally, there are five major types of roadmap documents: Product roadmaps, platform roadmaps, market roadmaps, strategic roadmaps, vision roadmaps, and technology or engineering roadmaps. You can, of course, mix and match these roadmap types to suit your organization’s needs.

How do you create a product roadmap? How do you create an engineering roadmap?

There are eight steps I always follow when I am asked to create each of these types of roadmap documents – you can mix this list of steps with your own ideas and experiences in creating roadmap documents:

1. Decide upon which type of roadmap document you will use based on your individual requirement for a roadmap document.

2. Think about how much time and effort, as well as level of detail, you think will be required for you to invest, or that you care to invest, in the creation of your chosen roadmap document type.

3. Brainstorm about significant forces or trends that you might want to represent on your roadmap document. These could include technical breakthroughs, market forces, and moves the competition has made recently.

4. Elicitate the precise roadmap document requirements from the primary internal stakeholders in the project, and document and prioritize those requirements, being careful to estalish and maintain traceability.

5. Product Roadmap documents are intrinsically linked with time, so think about the timeline you want to use and represent in your document.

6. Think about the impression your strategy will make and how you want to present that strategy in your roadmap document. This is one of the central purposes of the document you are preparing, to show that you have a strategy and are planning to implement it well and to schedule.

7. Sometimes I create an internal roadmap document and distribute it to the primary internal stakeholders within my organization for review and commentary. After gathering the project team’s comments regarding the internal roadmap, there is a good basis on which to draft the external roadmap document.

8. This colloborative approach is critical to obtaining buy-in from senior management as well as the roadmap document project team. This method also prevents surprises and last-minute revisions. Discussions surrounding the creation of roadmap documents can help solidify the company’s direction and clarify the intents of management to employees very effectively.

Prioritizing product and engineering roadmap features

There are probably potentially many features you could choose to highlight as a part of your product or engineering roadmap document. But in the interests of brevity and clarity, you will need to prioritize the features that are included in each of your upcoming product or service introductions or software releases and shown on your roadmap.

I have always found that a prioritization matrix document is the best bet for effective and colloborative feature selection for inclusion in a roadmap document. Microsoft Excel or another computer spreadsheet program works very well for preparing this type of document. The matrix should hold information regarding such components as startegic importance, tactical importance to the current release cycle, customer desireability level, retain revenue threat from customer dissatisfaction, revenue impact, source and date of the feature, planned release, etc.

Themes can be used to categorize major feature trends that you begin to see emerge from your prioritization matrix. Categorize like features into themes and then select one or a few major themes to represent graphically on your roadmap documents.

Timed release cycles use the timescale along the edge of your roadmap document to show when features will become available. This type of roadmap document is driven by time and not by features. Once the release interval is decided upon, then the feature list is divided up amongst the releases those features are planned to become available with.

The golden feature technique is one where each release is governed mainly by one important or central feature. Once you have selcted the golden feature for each release of a product or service that you are attempting to show on your roadmap document, then you will be able to focus the audience’s attention on that one feature, and highlight it in all your continued planning efforts for that release.

Using multiple roadmap documents

Combining a few or several different types of roadmap documents can greatly enhance your presentation, showing that you know where your company is headed and why it is that you have choosen to pursue a certain strategy. A vision roadmap could be used to open your presentation, showing trends in society at large that are afecting your marketplace. A technology roadmap could then be shown to your audience that reflects how your company and it’s products are capitalizing on technology trends within the marketplace. Then it is time for you to show off your internal and external product roadmaps, and perhaps your engineering roadmap that shows your planned releases and when certain feature sets will become available.

Showing multiple product lines on roadmap documents

You may need to show a few or several of your product lines on a roadmap, in order to visually represent how each of your product lines will evolve in accordance with a technology or marketplace trend. This is very easy to accomplish; simply create a roadmap document for one of your product lines or services,and then use that one product line as a template for showing the others on your single roadmap document.

I have found that it is helpful in many cases to create a prioritization matrix such as the one I mentioned elsewhere in this article regarding features to show on your roadmap documents. You can also create a product line prioritization matrix that can be used for discussion and colloboration with your internal stakeholders.

A product roadmap showcasing multiple product lines

Try and decide upon which projects, products, or services your company is undertaking that are the most important to your company, which ones should be funded and resourced, and which ones should be cut. Revenue potential, market positioning, strategic importance to the company, and interdependencies can and should be plotted out on this matrix. Once you have decided which products you want to represent on your roadmap document, it is a simple matter to modify your format to include multiple product lines on a single roadmap.

Five tips for creating product roadmaps

Here are a few more best practices that I have discovered throughout my career of preparing product roadmap documents.

It is essential that you realize from the outset that when working with a technical (programmer) audience in certain working environments, there may be a fair bit of resistance or friction originating within internal departments or product groups at your own company that you will need to overcome.

Many internal stakeholders may take umbrage at the point in the release cycle that certain features are slated for release on your roadmap document, they may assert strongly or even rudely that your presentation is false or feature sets you are publicly committing to will not be available.

It is important for you to always be ready to provide reasoning why the roadmaps are necessary, and why managing without such documents, at certain levels of business, becomes untenable.

1. Make sure that you colloborate early with your team. Your chances of being able to secure ultimate buy-in from the different internal constiuency groups within your company goes up markedly if they have been included from the roadmap document project’s outset.

2. Always use code names on your roadmap documents until they have been approved by the senior management team for release to the public at large. You cannot be sure that your roadmap documents will not be leaked out, even by senior managers. You can revise the code names to final product and project names when they are approved.

3. Minor releases and localized, international releases are sometimes not shown on product or engineering roadmaps, and they should be included, as they frequently enter into the follow-on conversations.

4. Create roadmap documents for an internal audience that are very specific in information and dates; roadmap documents intended for an external audience should be worded in more vague language and terminology.

5. Present your roadmap documents as uneditable adobe .pdf documents — this will prevent other parties internal to your company from taking the roadmap documents and altering them – these alterations can emerge unpleasantly later during the project(s) as a committment made to a client or customer by a senior manager or executive, so take care to avoid this scenario.

Examples of internal and external roadmap documents

Product roadmaps

Microsoft SQL server product roadmap

If you need to show your audience when your product’s new features will be available, what the theme or main and secondary features of the product release or next few releases will be, then an effective product roadmap should be your tool of choice.

Internal product roadmaps can be used to communicate budget, resource planning, project priority, and release planning to employees and department heads. They are extremely effective for driving efforts to obtain funding from senior management or corporate action committees.

An example of a product roadmap

External product roadmaps can be used to support funding efforts from investors or investment groups, business partner meetings. External product roadmap documents and slides can be used to reinforce public press releases and press conferences, analyst meetings and conference calls or webcasts, clients and channel partner webinars. It is oftentimes apparent that external roadmaps have been recast in a more vague tone as a result of internal roadmap feedback, which is generally a good thing.

Platform roadmaps

A platform roadmap

A platform roadmap is used to showcase what will be n the works for the platform or PaaS (Platform as a Service) that a particular company has under development. They are used to communicate that company’s overall platform strategy and the availability of APIs (Application Programming Interfaces, basically plug-ins to amd from the company’s platform software) and development tools for the company’s platform or PaaS.

If a company has developed and is supporting a platform in the marketplace currently, you can be sure that they have a platform strategy that relies on partners and clients working closely with them. The need to communicate the platform’s strategy in a clear and focused manner is very important. Examples of platforms include Salesforce.com (Force.com), Windoes (Windows Azure Cloud), Amazon S3 and Ec2, Google, Apple Mac OS X, Apple iOS, Hp WebOS, and many others.

Vision roadmaps

A vision roadmap example

There are times when at the onset of a demo or presentation, it is necessary to highlight for your audience how your product or products fit into a movement or trend within society in general or your company’s inductry in particular. This is a fantastic way in which you can build excitement and marketplace momentum for your company’s products or services by visually demonstrating how you fit into the big picture.

Marketing roadmaps

Microsoft Windows OS roadmap

A marketing roadmap communicates to your internal and external stakeholders what market segements your products and services are targeting, and how you plan to enter any of those markets in which you are not currently competing. As such, these types of roadmaps include information on the demographics and opportunity size of each marketplace, and information regarding how you plan to develop products and services to address each market. The timescale involved on marketing roadmaps can span years.

Marketing roadmap example

A marketing & strategy roadmap

Technology and Engineering Roadmaps

Technology and engineering roadmaps chart out major technology trends that exist in the marketplace, and show how your company’s products and services coordinate with those trends over time. Engineering roadmap documents are used to communicate feature sets that will be available in certain releases. The approximate release dates of each of the company’s upcoming product releases will be shown.

A technology roadmap

It is very common for a software development organization to create and maintain multiple engineering roadmaps, suitable for showing to various segmented audiences of internal and external stakeholders and directly responsible individuals. These engineering roadmaps are super tools for updating major clients and customers of your release cycle and aid greatly in the change management process.

A Microsoft Technology Roadmap

Engineering roadmaps also provide your internal development groups, qa, testers, programmers, business analysts, and product, program and project managers, as well as senior management, with a view into the development life of the company. A development organization that fails to produce such planning artifacts is essentially flying blind, and as they scale up (if they do scale up) as their business improves, they will find they lack the requisite skills needed to plan effectively and manage their clients’ expectations for quality products, software and services well.

Product roadmap template

Engineering roadmap template

I have included in this article many pictures and descriptions that you can use to create your own highly compelling product roadmap documents. They should serve as an excellent guide for not only the different types of roadmap documents that exist out here in the marketplace, but also how to place multiple product lines and services on a roadmap document.

Keep in mind, these are living documents, and should be continuously maintained and updated. Do not succumb to the programmer’s maxim “You can’t plan the future”. Remember: Plans are worthless, planning is priceless. The activity of creation, the discussion that surround the roadmap process, are all essentially components of effective long term product planning and corporate strategy.

Roadmaps can be used to share information with internal teams, external constituents or as a planning tool for the Product Management team, but whichever you choose, you have to figure out whether you are going to make the focus of the roadmap strategy or release calendar. If it is strategy, your timeline can be vague — quarters or years. If it’s release calendar, the near-term has to be pretty specific: exact date or month, but the future can be more nebulous.

I have include a few simple microsoft visio and microsoft excel roadmap document templates to get you started. By all means, you should feel free to use the illustrations and prose contained in this article, as well as any graphics or business drawing tools that you are comfortable with, to create your own formats and presentations. Some of my favorite programs for creating these types of artifacts with include adobe illustrator, photoshop, microsoft visio, microsoft excel, and coreldraw. I also have a big bag of Linux and Apple Mac OS X tools that I use to create roadmap documents in addition to the ones I have just mentioned. Product management software such as Accept, Accompa, FeaturePlan, FocalPoint and others can also assist you in creating roadmap documents. If you need help or advice, I am always available via email or social media like LinkedIn. If we’re not connected on LinkedIn, please send me an invitation to connect. And good luck with your roadmaps!

roadmap_template1

SvN Flashback: Product roadmaps are dangerous (37signals.com)
The Start-Up Drive : Startups need planning. (dannedelko.com)

Want to know more?

About the author.

I’m Paul Seibert, Editor of Boston’s Hub Tech Insider, a Boston focused technology blog. You can connect with me on LinkedIn, follow me on Twitter, follow me on Quora, even friend me on Facebook if you’re cool. I own and am trying to sell a dual-zoned, residential & commercial Office Building in Natick, MA. I have a background in entrepreneurship, ecommerce, telecommunications and software development, I’m a PMO Director, I’m a serial entrepreneur and the co-founder of several ecommerce and web-based software startups, the latest of which is Tshirtnow.net.

What is UML? What is Unified Modeling Language? July 17, 2011

Posted by HubTechInsider in Agile Software Development, Project Management, Software.
Tags: Agile Software Development, Finite-state machine, Methodologies, Modeling language, Programming, Project Management, Sequence diagram, Software Development, Software Engineering, Systems Modeling Language, UML, Unified Modeling Language, Use case, Use case diagram
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A collage of UML diagrams including use case diagram, class diagram, activity diagrams, sequence diagrams, deployment diagram,component diagrams, composite structure diagram, package diagrams. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

What is UML?

UML is an acronym for Unified Modeling Language. UML is widely accepted as the de facto standard description language for the specification and design of object-oriented software systems. UML is a family of “languages”, or diagram types, that attempt to bring together the “best in breed” software specification techniques for describing software systems. Users and practicioners of UML can choose which members of the family are the most suitable for their application domain.

Personally, I have become associated with UML through my years and years of specifying software products. Several of the UML diagram types that I will discuss below are among my primary tools for communicating application and system requirements and software designs to programmers.

I do not advocate, nor do I personally practice, an over-attachment to UML. Like many of these project management and requirements management techniques, there is a time and a place for the proper introduction of these types of UML artifacts into the software development process. Programmers may be unfamiliar with the UML diagram types and symbology, and so if you are a business analyst, project, program or product manager, and you are using these types of project deliverables with a new staff of engineers, be prepared to explain the UML diagram type you are using, keep the introductions down to one or two different new UML “Languages”, or diagram types, at a time.

I also recommend that if you insert UML diagrams into your functional specification documents, and I recommend that if you have invested the time to properly prepare UML diagrams that you do leverage them into your spec docs, make sure that you include an explanatory prose component into your accompanying functional specification document’s text.

There are nine different types of UML languages, or diagram types:

1. Use Case.

2. Sequence.

3. Collaboration.

4. Statechart.

5. Activity.

6. Class.

7. Object.

8. Component.

9. Deployment.

Five of these diagram types render behavioral views, the use case, sequence, collaboration, statechart and activity diagrams, while the remaining four diagram types are concerned with architectural or static aspects of the software design.

How does UML help in specifying a software design?

UML is a graphical language that is based on the premise that any software system can be described in terms of interacting business entities and that various aspects of these entities and their interactions, can be described visually using one or more of the above nine types of UML diagrams.

Use Case diagrams represent and document the dialog between external (to the system under discussion, as in an embedded system) actors and the system.

Sequence and collaboration diagrams describe interactions between objects.

Activity diagrams illustrate the flow of control between objects.

Statecharts represent the internal dynamics of active objects.

What is UML 2.0?

UML 2.0 is a revision to Unified Modeling Language that incorporates several improvements to UML. UML 2.0 is only just now beginning to supplant UML as the de facto standard.

A shorthand description of UML 2.0 is that it is designed for more rigor of specification, and it can sometimes be too much, or too much of a fine-grained distinction to bandy about when in an actual day-to-day, working software development environment. You are very likely to be working with only a subset of the UML languages, or diagram types, I outlined above at any one given point in the development project.

UML 2.0, when the diagrams are laid out in a software program such as VisualUML or others, can actually be used to generate working object code. If the business analysts have developed their proficiency enough with UML diagramming software, they can actually construct and output from these programs working java (or other programming language) object code.

In order to obtain this level of integration with application programmers, UML 2.0 had to have more access to a more robust and constrained specification language. The improvements to UML 2.0 include:

1. New base classes that provide the foundation for UML modeling constructs.

2. Object constraint language, a formal method that canbe used to better describe object interactions.

3. An improved diagram meta-model that allows users to model systems from four viewpoints:

a. Static models (e.g., class diagrams)

b. Interaction (e.g., using sequence diagrams)

c. Activity (i.e., to describe the flow of activities within a system)

d. State (i.e., to create FSMs, or Finite State Machines, using state charts)

UML has always been used to not only specify software systems for systems and application programming, but also specification for embedded systems as well. This emphasis on the notion of time and state is evident in the way that sequence diagrams are implemented in UML, and indicates the special considerations that were undertaken to support embedded systems design in the original conception of UML.

UML is a standard… Which one? (vhanniet.wordpress.com)
SysML, UML, MML (bulldozer00.com)
UML class diagrams easier to understand than ER diagrams (modeling-languages.com)

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About the author.

What is pattern-based software development? What is pattern-based design for software projects? July 17, 2011

Posted by HubTechInsider in Agile Software Development, Project Management, Software.
Tags: Agile Software Development, Anti-pattern, Christopher Alexander, Design, Design Patterns, Pattern language, Programming, Software Development
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Image via Wikipedia

What is pattern-based software development?

What was the original impetus behind the development of software development patterns, and why do we need them? Why did programmers invent patterns for software development?

Well, developing software is very difficult, and developing software that can be easily reused is even harder. the designs for sections of software code should be general enough solutions to be able to address future problems and requirements flexibly while still being specific enough in order to address the current problem at hand. Programmers that are experienced at designing software systems know better than to design their system using one-off problem solutions, and instead reuse patterns that they have grown familiar with through prior use in similar situations and scenarios and reuse these solutions as a basis for their new designs. The basic fundamental principle of software engineering known as the “Principle of generality” predicts and encourages this behavior.

What’s so great about programmers using pattern-based development on software projects?

For one thing, it is absolutely fascinating to sit in a meeting room with a group of programmers who have been working all together on a software development project using patterns for a few months. The rate of information exchange is extremely high, with a idea mentioned by one programmer, and a few others simultaneously finishing the first programmer’s sentence with an exclaimed, unison word like “Bridge!”, and then one of them scribbling lines of code frantically on the whiteboard as the rest nod in compliment.

The language of the programming team using patterns is mysterious and magical, almost like incantations spoken in some artful black language. Many computer science instructors contend with conviction that the teaching of patterns and the learning of them speeds the learner’s adoption of the principles of object oriented software technology. It is undeniable that the learning of patterns improves the programmers’ development vocabulary.

Software design patterns also help in finding appropriate objects, in determining the apropos object granularity and in designing a software system that is architected from the outset to better adapt to change. At the design level, patterns enable large-scale reuse of software architectures by capturing the expert knowledge of pattern based development and distributing it throughout the development team.

It is generally acknowledged that these are the two most important benefits: the way in which they form a vocabulary for articulating design decisions during the normal course of development conversations among promgrammers. This can also come into play during the close programming work of so-called “pair programming“, among those who have found it to be useful for them.

When you are working with a group of programmers who are either working in pairs or as part of a group using pattern-based development, you frequently hear talk like “I think we need a strategy here”, or, from one programmer to the rest of the group, “Let’s implement this functionality as an Observer”.

Programmers’ familiarity with pattern-based development has also become a kind of hiring shorthand. Whenever a talented programmer leaves a software development team I am leading, and we need to replace him or her with anther programmer, I use the “Do we need a programmer familiar with design patterns” question as a line of demarcation for recruiting and hiring decisions. The answer is *not* always to hire an expensive programmer intimately familiar with design patterns, either.

It is fashionable in development manager circles to use design patterns as a hiring demarcation line as well, as in the following exchange:

“So…regarding design patterns: what would you say is your favorite design pattern?”

“Well, the factory, I guess.”

“Yeah…OK…thanks for coming down.”

What does a software development pattern look like?

A pattern is a problem-solution pair that can be applied in a similar fashion in new contexts; the pattern is complete with advice on how to apply it in the new context. It is important to note that the formal definition of a pattern is not consistent in the literature.

There are three types of patterns:

1. An architectural pattern occurs across software subsystems.

2. A design pattern occurs within a subsystem but is independent of the language.

3. An idiom is a low-level pattern that is programming language-specific.

Each individual pattern is compromised of four elements:

1. A name. Some of the names of the software design patterns can be rather whimsical: “flyweight”, and “singleton”. The whimsy is to serve the purpose of making the patterns memorable to programmers.

2. A problem description. The problem part of the pattern describes the problem and its context, as well as specific design issues such as how to represent algorithms as objects. The problem statement may also speak about when it is best to apply this particular pattern and may also describe class structures that are symptoms of an inflexible software design.

3. A solution to the problem. The solution part of the design pattern does not desibe any one particular concrete design or implementation, but only describes the elements that make up the design, The solution only provides a general arrangement of objects and classes which can be used to solve this type of problem.

4. The consequences of the solution. This part of the design pattern describes the results and inherent risks and trade-offs associated with applying this particular design pattern. It may include the impact of this design pattern on space and time, programming language and implementation issues, or include notes on software flexibility, system extensibility, and portability. These consequences are critical for evaluating alternative software design patterns.

What is the history of software design patterns?

The concept of design patterns was first introduced by Christopher Alexander for use in architecture and town planning. He realized that architects encounterd the same sorts of problems when engaged in the design of buildings and once an elegant architectural solution to these common problems was discovered, it could be repeated over and over again. In 1977, he wrote a book, published by the Oxford University Press, called “A Pattern Language”, in which he stated:

“Each pattern describes a problem which occurs over and over again in our environment, and then describes the core of the solution to that problem, in such a way that you can use this solution a million times over, without ever doing it the same way twice”

Design patterns as an idea were first applied to computer software programming in the 1980’s, when the infamous “Gang of Four” book, “Design Patterns: Elements of Reusable Object-Oriented Software” popularized the use of design patterns. Ward Cunningham, Kent Beck, and Jim Coplien were some of the initial practicioners and popularizers of software design patterns.

What are the “Gang of Four” software design patterns?

The “Gang of four” book first introduced this set of patterns into the software programming world. The book lays out 23 design patterns for software development, and it was first published in 1995. Building upon the work of Kent Beck, Christopher Alexander, and others, the gang of four set out to redirect all of the effort being put into “rengineering the wheel” in software development teams all over the world and redirect it into something much more useful.

The book was an instant hit with computer programmers, selling over half a million copies since its publication in 1995 and undoubtedly influencing the thoughts and code of millions of computer programmers worldwide. Many computer programmers can vividly remember buying their first copy of the book and in addition many computer programmers look upon their reading of the book as a rite of passage. It can be a difficult book to get through, and it is not infrewunt for even advanced computer programmers to have to spend several readthroughs in order to extract the desired effects out of their investment of time in the gang of four’s words. The book did two very important things for programmers:

First, computer software programmers were introduced to the world of design patterns, where each pattern is a prepackaged solution to a common design problem. The book encourages programmers to look at their code and to find and identify common solutions to common problems. Programmers should give each solution a name, and they should talk about what each solution is good for, and when to use each solution, and when to reach for something that is a more appropriate solution. If all of these solutions are documented well, then over time more and more programmers will become better and more effiecient programmers, and this knowledge can be distributed throughout the developer community in the most direct and sane way.

Secondly, the book describes 23 software design patterns that are organized into three groups based on the intention for their use: creational, behavioral, or structural:

1. Creation design patterns are associated with object creation and their intent is to allow programmers to create software objects without actually knowing what they are creating beyond the interfaces themselves. There is a fundamental principle in computer programming, known as information hiding. When programmers code using interfaces to object creation and objects, then they are following this fundamental principle well.

As described by Gamma, Helm, Johnson and Vlissides, the “Gang of four”, these creational patterns include the abstract factory, the builder, the factory method, the prototype, and the singleton.

2. Structural design patterns are concerned with organization classes. Structural design patterns are static in nature; they are not designed to change. As laid out by the Gang of four, structural design patterns include the adapter, the bridge, composite, decorator, facade, flyweight, and proxy.

3. Behavioral design patterns are concerned with runtime or dynamic system behavior of the program, and they help define the roles of software objects and their interactions. By their dynamic nature, behavioral patterns are designed to change, and are not static and contain very little “structural” code. The gang of four describe behavioral software design patterns called the chain of responsibility, command, interpreter, iterator, mediator, memento, observer, state, strategy, template method and visitor.

In the years that have followed the publication of the gang of four book, and as I will get into in more depth here in a moment, many different sets of alternative design patterns have been proposed. the original gang of four patterns – the 23 patterns I wrote of above – really stick to the old school, middle ground of object-oriented software design. Smaller than a database system, but larger than just a simple hashtable. They focus on some very key questions that face all programmers that are tasked with building an object oriented software system: how do you know what types of objets to create, how many, and how? How should these objects relate and interoperate? What should they know about each other? How should they be coupled together? How can programmers swap out parts that are likely to change frequently with the most efficiency?

What are some of the situations in which a software design pattern might be used?

Each individual situation which is faced by software programmers will have an individual solution tailored for that specific situation. If this were not the case, then a piece of complete, reusable software code could be used, instead of the rough problem-solution description of a design pattern.

It is not difficult, however, for me to illustrate a few of the scenarios and what type of design pattern could potentially be used to address this situation:

If a programmer is faced with a situation in which there needs to be one and only one instance of a class in the application – the single class that everybody uses. This would be a scenario for the singleton pattern.

If a programmer needs to include code from another programming language to best solves the problem at hand, then the programmer could use the Interpreter design pattern in order to use that code programmed in another language directly.

If a programmer is faced with a scenario in which an object needs to be created according to a complex, precise, and changing, set of parameters. In this circumstance, perhaps the builder pattern would be best to utilize.

If a programmer or development team is faced with a scenario where they have objects which need to take on additional responsibilities at runtime in addition to their established responsibilities, then the decorator design pattern made be called for.

Are there any other popular sets of software design patterns?

There are indeed many other sets of software design patterns. For instance, Martin Fowler laid out a very popular set of software analysis design patterns in his 1996 book, “Analysis Patterns: Reusable Object Models” , and there was also a set of software architecture and design patterns laid out in the excellent and well-read book, also published in 1996, “Pattern-Oriented Software Architecture, Volume 1: A System of Patterns“.

But one of the most popular and well-known, regarded, and most-used set of software design patterns was popularized by Craig Larman in his 2002 book, “Applying UML and Patterns“. He called them the GRASP patterns, for general principles in assigning responsibilities, and they are a fairly high-level set of patterns for software design. There are nine GRASP patterns for software design:

1. Creator.

2. Controller.

3. Expert.

4. Low coupling.

5. High cohesion.

6. Polymorphism.

7. Pure fabrication.

8. Indirected.

9. Protected variations.

I will select one of the GRASP patterns I have listed above and describe what the pattern actually is in terms of the name of the design pattern, the problem the design pattern is trying to solve, and the solution for the problem as implemented using the design pattern.

For instance, a scenario that would be best served by the Creator design pattern would be one in which the problem is that it is unclear who should be responsible for creating a new instance of a class.

The solution as proposed by the Creator pattern would be to assign this responsibility to a class B to create an instance of class A if one or more of the following is true: (a) B aggregates A objects, (b) B contains A objects, (c) B records instances of A objects, (d) B closely uses A objects. B has the initializing data that will be passed to A when it is created.

How about design patterns in the Ruby programming language?

You probably realized that I wasn’t going to write an entire article of this length and depth without pimping Ruby. Design patterns are particularly easy to implement in Ruby, partially because of similarities between Smalltalk, the programming language used by the Gang of four to illustrate their programming examples in their design patterns book, and Ruby, and partly because of syntax peculiarities inherent in the Ruby programming language.

Ruby’s absence of static typing lowers the overall number of lines of code to begin with, and the Ruby standard library (if you have been paying attention, you recall the difference between code libraries and design patterns) makes it possible to implement many of the most common design patterns in Ruby with a single one-line include.

Other design patterns are essentially built into the Ruby programming language itself. For instance, a Command object in the canonical Gang of four sense is a state-aware code wrapper, something very closely approximated by a Ruby construct known as a Proc, or a Ruby code block object. This is not to say that although a simple Command construct can be implemented in Ruby with a single one-line include, if we add more complex state and behavior information to the block, the implementation will not need some additional Ruby code. As I stated earlier in this article, and without equivocation, design patterns do not lead to direct code reuse, this is the work of software libraries.

The main point I am trying to promote is that because design patterns are the common idioms of object-oriented software code, a good or great programming language should make design patterns easy to implement, or even make the use of them nearly a transparent excercise, as if the design patterns’ usage was inherent in the use of the language itself.

Ruby works marvelously well in a pattern-based software development environment because:

1. Static typing reduces code bloat and overhead. Common patterns can be implemented in less code. You can turn a class into a singleton with a simple “include singleton” command.

2. Ruby has code closures, which means that chunks of code can be passed around complete with their associated scope within a program without having to construct entire classes and objects whose only purpose is this scope and code transferral.

3. Ruby classes are real objects, so any runtime operation that can be applied to a Ruby class can be used to implement the logical intent of any of the design patterns. A Ruby class can be modified by adding or deleting methods. A class can be cloned and the copy can be modified while leaving the original class unmodified.

4. Ruby has mixins, which in addition to the same inheritance of other programming languages, is a simple yet sophisticated way in which Ruby code can be shared among several Ruby classes.

One of the books I recommend all Ruby programmers read is “Design patterns in Ruby“, by Russ Olsen, with a foreword by renowned Ruby programmer Obie Fernandez.

In the book, you will learn why there are only 14 patterns in Ruby instead of 23 original Gang of four patterns, and you will also find out about three new Ruby-specific design patterns that have a great deal of usefulness in Ruby.

Are there any drawbacks or negatives to using pattern-based software development?

Well, actually, there are several drawbacks to all of this talk of pattern-based software development.

One of the main drawbacks, and one of the most important thing for technical project managers and business stakeholders as well as senior managers to keep in mind, is that patterns do not lead to direct software reuse.

Direct reuse of sections of software code is for software libraries. Patterns do not create or promote software libraries of reuable plug-and-play software code, but rather lead to reuable design, architectures and techniques which can be converted by computer programmers into unique program code.

Even though the cutesy names of software design patterns may lead you to believe that they are also simpe to learn, they are not. It is easy enough to master some of their names, and to also memorize their structure visually, but it is not very easy to see how they can lead to actual design solutions. This can take even very experienced computer programmers years and years of practice, education and working experience.

Integrating the use of software patterns into an actual, real-world development organization’s daily development life and regular deployment cycle can be a daunting task. The integration, aside from the demands the aforementioned education and training can take on a development staff compromised of computer programmers unfamiliar with the software design patterns described above, is a very labor-intensive activity.

A software development team’s programmers may experience pattern overload, whereby in their unending quest to use pattern-based techniques, they have become an obsession rather than as an effective and efficient means to an end. Aa mentioned above, software design patterns are no silver bullet, and do not lead to direct code reuse, but rather provide another approach to systematically solving software design problems that are commonly and frequently encountered by software development teams.

Home of the Design Patterns Library and Host of the PLoP Conferences (hillside.net)
The “Gang of Four” software patterns (cartesianproduct.wordpress.com)
We should always use MVC (gastonnusimovich.wordpress.com)

Want to know more?

About the author.

I’m Paul Seibert, Editor of Boston’s Hub Tech Insider, a Boston focused technology blog. You can connect with me on LinkedIn, follow me on Twitter, follow me on Quora, even friend me on Facebook if you’re cool. I own and am trying to sell a dual-zoned, residential & commercial Office Building in Natick, MA. I have a background in entrepreneurship, ecommerce, telecommunications and software development, I’m a Technical PMO Director, I’m a serial entrepreneur and the co-founder of several ecommerce and web-based software startups, the latest of which are Twitterminers.com and Tshirtnow.net.

What are the qualities of bad software code? How can you tell if your software project has bad code? July 12, 2011

Posted by HubTechInsider in Agile Software Development, Project Management, Software.
Tags: Agile Software Development, Programming, Project Management, Project manager, Software Engineering
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Image via Wikipedia

What are the qualities of bad code? How can you tell if your software project has bad code?

Troubled software projects and bad code are facts of life in the software business. Today’s applications, system software, even embedded and operating systems programming is increasing being outsourced or at least distributed.

The need for being able to quickly evaluate the quality of software code, describe any known issue in simple aterms and then execute on a planned approach to rectify these issues is greater than ever.

A common vocabulary for project teams, refactoring engineers, and project managers and stakeholders is of a fundamental assistance in manageing software development projects.

You may find yourself sitting in a meeting or conference room or perhaps on a conference call with a group of computer programmers who are discussing some sections of code, or if you are particularly unlucky, perhaps an entire application of software development project, that is troubled using some of these below listed terms. After each of these negative, “bad code” terms I have tried to describe what is meant by each of these terms for bad software. After each description, I list the term for the opposite, positive “good code” quality contrary to the bad code quality.

1. Fragility: When changes in the software code cause the system to break in places that have no conceptual relationship to the part that was changed. This is a sign of poor design. The opposite of fragility is known as robustness.

2. Immobility: When the code is hard to resuse. The opposite of immobility is known as re-usability.

3. Needless complexity: When the design is more elaborate than it needs to be. This is sometimes also called “Gold plating”. The opposite of complexity is known as simplicity.

4. Needless repetition: This occurs when cut-and-paste of code segments is used too frequently. The opposite of repetition is known as parsimony.

5. Opacity: When the code is written in such as manner as it is not clear. The opposite of opacity is known as clarity.

6. Rigidity: When the design is hard to change because every time you change something, there are many other changes needed to other parts of the system. The opposite of rigidity is known as flexibility.

7. Viscosity: When it is easier to do the wrong thing, such as a quick and dirty fix, than the right thing. The opposite of viscosity is known as fluidity.

In order for your software development project to feature the opposite, more desirable positive qualities to the ones listed above, your project must exhibit a good software architecture, solid software design, and effective coding practices.

For further reading on this topic, I highly recommend the excellent book by R.C. Martin, “Agile Software Development, Principles, Patterns, and Practices“, Prentice-Hall, Englewood Cliffs, NJ, 2002.

Want to know more?

About the author.

I’m Paul Seibert, Editor of Boston’s Hub Tech Insider, a Boston focused technology blog. You can connect with me on LinkedIn, follow me on Twitter, follow me on Quora, even friend me on Facebook if you’re cool. I own and am trying to sell a dual-zoned, residential & commercial Office Building in Natick, MA. I have a background in entrepreneurship, ecommerce, telecommunications and software development, I’m a Technical PMO Director, I’m a serial entrepreneur and the co-founder of several ecommerce and web-based software startups, the latest of which are Twitterminers.com and Tshirtnow.net.

What is software traceability? What is a software requirements traceability matrix? July 12, 2011

Posted by HubTechInsider in Agile Software Development, Project Management, Software.
Tags: Programming, Project Management, Requirement, Software Development, traceability, traceability matrix
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What is Traceability in software development?

In my experience working on custom software development projects, the number one cause of project failure is inadequate requirements. When programmers code either without requirements or with inadequate requirements, nothing good ever comes of it.

The relationship between the requirements, the source of those requirements, and the system design that is ostensibly being built to enable those requirements, is what code traceability is all about.

I think it is very important to point out that regardless of the software development lifecycle process model you and your team happen to be following, be it a traditional “Waterfall” type software model or a so-called “Agile” fixed-iteration development lifecycle, documentation and code traceability is paramount.

If your software has provided for a high level of traceability, then the requirements can flow down through the design and code and then can be traced back up at every stage of the process.

This makes it a simple matter to trace a coding decision back to a design decision to satisfy a corresponding requirement.

In embedding systems software engineering, traceability is vital because hardware constraints can act as limiting factors on design and coding decisions that may not be as easily associated with a requirement as in a non-embedded system design.

When even a basic “traceability matrix” is not provided for on a software project, then the lack of a traceability path from design and coding decisions back through to the requirements can lead to severe difficulties in extending and maintaining the system.

What is a software traceability matrix?

A software traceability matrix document can take many different forms, but one of the most common forms is a table-like document that serves simply as a graphical representation of all of the cross referenced links between project deliverables and artifacts, and the code.

This cross referenced table is constructed, usually using a spreadsheet application program, by listing the relevant software documents and then the doe unit as columns, and each software requirement as a row.

An example of a software requirement tracing matrix.

If you use a spreadsheet program, then you can create multiple matrices sorted and cross-refernced by each column as needed. For example, you could provide a traceability matrix sorted by test case number, which could serve as a very apropos appendix to the test plan.

The traceability matrices should be updated at each step in the software life cycle. For example, the column for the code unit names, things like procedure names, object classes, etc., can not be added until after the code is developed.

What are the elements of a good traceability matrix?

A traceability matrix is a document, sometimes in the form of a table, that will provide a cross reference between all the documentation and software code in a system.

At a very minimum, a good traceability matrix will provide links, or cross references showing the associations between the following elements:

1. From the requirements to the stakeholders who first proposed these requirements, with the dates they were first proposed.

2. The associations between any dependent requirements listed.

3. From the requirements through to the system design, or functional specification document.

4. From the design to the relevant code segments. (oftentimes referencing the technical specification document).

5. From the requirements to the test plan document.

6. From the test plan to the relevant test cases.

What is requirements traceability?

Software requirements traceability is the ability for a project team to provide references that document the relationships between the software requirements, their sources, and the system design. If software requirements traceability has been provided well, then the requirements can be linked to their source, to other requirements, and to design elements.

Requirements traceability links between the different requirements, source traceability links these requirements to the stakeholders who proposed those requirements, and design traceability link from the requirements to the system design documents.

The software requirements document, sometimes referred to as the SRS, or software requirements specification document, MUST be “traceable”, because the software requirements provide the starting point for the entire traceability chain.

It is very common within professional project management organizations, or PMOs, to enact and enforce traceability policies which codify how much information regarding requirement relationships is required to be maintain, and the format in which this information is to be presented. There are a number of open source and proprietary open-source tools which can be used to help improve a software organization’s requirements traceability.

A traceability matrix sorted by requirement numbers that correspond to a numbering scheme

The overarching goal of software traceability and software traceability matrix is to ensure that for critical software, nothing falls through the cracks. Ultimately there is a way of mapping for each requirement which test cases exist to cover that requirement and the functional specification.

As shown in the sample traceability matrix above, one way to show the traceability from requirements through design and testing is through the use of an appropriate numbering system throughout the documentation for the system. For example, a requirement numbered 3.2.2.1 would be linked to a design element with a similar number (the numbers don’t have to be the same so long as the annotation in the document provides traceability). The main intent here is to show that all the appropriate documents and project deliverables are connected through referencing and notation.

Want to know more?

About the author.

Traceability Woes (bulldozer00.com)

What is a User Story? How are they used in Requirements Gathering and in writing User Acceptance Tests? October 3, 2010

Posted by HubTechInsider in Agile Software Development, Definitions, Project Management.
Tags: Acceptance testing, agile, agile development, Agile Software Development, Extreme programming, Methodologies, mobile software, Paul Seibert, Programming, Project Management, release planning, Software, Software Development, user acceptance criteria, user acceptance tests, User Experience, User interface, User Story
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Image via Wikimedia

What is a User Story? How are they used in Requirements Gathering and in writing User Acceptance Tests?

User Stories are short conversational texts that are used for initial requirements discovery and project planning. User stories are widely used in conjunction with agile software development project management methodologies for Release Planning and definition of User Acceptance Criteria for software development projects.

User Goals, stated in the form of User Stories, are more closely aligned with Business Priorities than software development Tasks and so it is the User Story format which prevails in written statements of User Acceptance Criteria.

An Agile Project Team is typically oriented to completing and delivering User-valued Features rather than on completing isolated development Tasks.These development Tasks eventually combine into a User-valued Feature).

User Goals are not the same things as software development Tasks. A User Goal is an end condition, whereas a development Task is an intermediate process needed to achieve this User Goal. To help illustrate this point, here are two example scenarios:

1. If my User Goal is to laze in my hammock reading the Sunday Boston Globe newspaper, I first have to mow the lawn. My Task is mowing; My Goal is resting. If I was able to recruit someone else to mow the lawn, I could achieve my Goal without having to do the mowing, the Task.

2. Tasks change as implementation technology or development approaches change, but Goals have the pleasant property of remaining stable on software development projects. For example, if I am a hypothetical User traveling from Boston to San Francisco, my User Goals for the trip might include Speed, Comfort and Safety. Heading for California on this proposed trip in 1850, I would have made the journey in a high technology Conestoga wagon for Speed and Comfort, and I would have brought along a Winchester rifle for Safety. However, making the same trip in 2010, with the same User Goals, I would now make the journey in a new Boeing 777 for updated Speed and Comfort and for Safety’s sake I would now leave the Winchester rifle at home.

· My User Goals remained unchanged, however the Tasks have changed so much that they are now seemingly in direct opposition. User Goals are steady, software development Tasks as stated on SOWs (Statements Of Work) are transient.

· Designing User Acceptance Criteria around software development Tasks rarely suits, but User Acceptance Criteria based on User Goals always does.

A User Story is a brief description of functionality as viewed by a User or Customer of the System. User Stories are free-form, and there is no mandatory syntax. However, it can be useful to think of a User Story as generally fitting this form:

“As a <type of User>, I want <Capability> so that <Business Value>”.

Using this template as an example, we might have a User Story like this one:

“As a Store Manager, I want to search for a Service Ticket by Store so that I can find the right Service Ticket quickly”.

User stories form the basis of User Acceptance Testing. Acceptance tests can be created to verify that the User Story has been correctly implemented.

User Story Card

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You’re reading Boston’s Hub Tech Insider, a blog stuffed with years of articles about Boston technology startups and venture capital-backed companies,software development, Agile project management, managing software teams, designing web-based business applications, running successful software development projects, ecommerce and telecommunications.

About the author.

I’m Paul Seibert, Editor of Boston’s Hub Tech Insider, a Boston focused technology blog. You can connect with me on LinkedIn, follow me on Twitter, even friend me on Facebook if you’re cool. I own and am trying to sell a dual-zoned, residential & commercial Office Building in Natick, MA. I have a background in entrepreneurship, ecommerce, telecommunications andsoftware development, I’m the Director, Technical Projects at eSpendWise, I’m a serial entrepreneur and the co-founder of Tshirtnow.net.

Persona driven user stories for Agile UX (disambiguity.com)
User Stories and Such (disambiguity.com)
The Extreme Programming Software Development Process (brighthub.com)
Agile User Stories, Themes, Epics, Features – What’s The Difference? (agile-software-development.com)
The Agile Samurai (Pragmatic Bookshelf) (i-programmer.info)
Re-Engineering In Agile Development Can Just Be Refactoring (regulargeek.com)
Cross-Functional Teams Don’t Come Free | Agile Zone (agile.dzone.com)
imabonehead: Releasing Every Fortnight | Engineering Blog – Genius.com Marketing SaaS (eng.genius.com)
Agile Requirements that Make Sense (devx.com)
A recipe for enterprise agile. Mixing Scrum and Smart (sanderhoogendoorn.com)
Extreme Programming: Iteration Planning (brighthub.com)
18 ways to speed up a CRM project – part two (customerthink.com)
Why Speed & Frequency of Software Security Testing Matter, A LOT (jeremiahgrossman.blogspot.com)
Pathos Least (cadsmith.wordpress.com)

What’s the difference between a Graphic Designer, an Information Architect and an Interaction Designer? September 15, 2010

Posted by HubTechInsider in Agile Software Development, Definitions, Ecommerce, Mobile Software Applications, Project Management, Social Media, Software, VoIP, VUI Voice User Interface, Wireless Applications.
Tags: Design, Graphic design, Human-Computer Interaction, Information architecture, Interaction Design, Interaction Designer, Library science, Mobile Applications, mobile software, mobile web, UI, User Experience, User interface, UX, VUI, Website, World Wide Web
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Information Architecture is the study of the organization and structure of effective web systems. Information architects study and design the relationships between internal page elements, as well as the relationships and navigation paths between individual pages. They combine Web design, information and library science as well as technical skills to order enterprise knowledge and design organizational systems within websites that help Users find and manage information more successfully. They are also responsible for things like ordering tabs and content sections of a web-based software application. They try to structure content and access to functions in such a way as to facilitate Users finding paths to knowledge and the swift accomplishment of their User Goals with the System.

Graphic Design is the skill of creating presentations of content (usually hypertext or hypermedia) that are delivered to Users through the World Wide Web, by way of a Web browser or other Web-enabled software like Internet television clients, micro blogging clients and RSS readers. Graphic designers study and design graphic elements, logos, artwork, stock photography, typography, font selection, color selection, color palettes and CSS styles.

Interaction Design is the process of creating an interface for the user to engage with a site or application’s functionality and content. Interaction designers are concerned mainly with facilitating users’ goals and tasks, and use a systematic and iterative process for designing highly interactive user interfaces. Their methodology includes research and discovery techniques such as requirements analysis, stakeholder analysis, task analysis, as well as prototyping, inspection and evaluation methods to define the structure and behavior of a web-based software system.

What’s the difference between Design and User Experience?

Design is about changing understanding; user experience is about changing behavior.

Design is about intent; user experience is about purpose.

Design is about style; user experience is about substance.

Design is about the platform; user experience is about the person.

Design is about the present; user experience is about the past and future.

Design is about action; user experience is about impact.

10 Usability Tips Based on Research Studies (sixrevisions.com)
Why I think Ryan Carson doesn’t believe in UX Professionals, and why I do (andybudd.com)
Social Interaction Designers are gunning for your website (businessesgrow.com)
Getting Started with Interface Design (net.tutsplus.com)
On the importance of social interaction design for social startups (gravity7.com)
A Web Designers Guide to Information Architecture (inspiredm.com)
New Column Launch: The User Experience (libraryjournal.com)
On defining UX (markboulton.co.uk)

What is Theory Y? How is it used as a management style? November 29, 2009

Posted by HubTechInsider in Agile Software Development, Definitions, Management, Project Management.
Tags: Agile Software Development, developers, Management, product management, Project Management, topics
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What is Theory Y? How is it used as a management style?

As I have said on these pages before, I needed to write a few short pieces on some of the different management styles I have encountered in my corporate and professional travels. I want to define each of these management styles so that I can compare and contrast them, as well as serving as reference points for the longer articles on this topic which I am in the process of drafting.

As I have previously stated, the purpose of this litany of alphabetic management styles is not to promote one over another; in fact, I don’t recommend adopting any of these naively. But nevertheless, many individual team members and managers will exhibit some behaviors from one of the above styles, and it is helpful to know what makes them tick. Finally, certain individuals may prefer to be managed as a Theory X or Theory Y type (Theory Z, which I will write about at a future date, is less likely in this case), and it is good to be able to recognize the signs. Moreover, some companies might be implicitly based on one style or another.

The second management style about which I will write is one which will be perhaps less recognizable to many people than the aforementioned “Theory X“: “Theory Y”.

As opposed to Theory X, Theory Y holds that work is a natural and desirable activity. Hence, external control abd threats are not needed to guide the organization. In fact, the level of commitment is based on the clarity and desirability of the goals set for the group. Theory Y posits that most individuals actually seek responsibility and do not shirk it, as proposed by Theory X.

A Theory Y manager simply needs to provide the resources, articulate the goals, and leave the team alone. This approach doesn’t always work, of course, because some individuals do need more supervision than others.

Want to know more?

About the author.

I’m Paul Seibert, Editor of Boston’s Hub Tech Insider, a Boston focused technology blog. You can connect with me on LinkedIn, follow me on Twitter, even friend me on Facebook if you’re cool. I own and am trying to sell a dual-zoned, residential & commercial Office Building in Natick, MA. I have a background in entrepreneurship, ecommerce, telecommunications and software development, I’m the Director, Technical Projects at eSpendWise, I’m a serial entrepreneur and the co-founder of Tshirtnow.net.

What is Theory X? How is it used as a management style? November 27, 2009

Posted by HubTechInsider in Agile Software Development, Definitions, Management, Project Management, Staffing & Recruiting.
Tags: Agile Software Development, developers, Management, postmortem, product management, Project Management, Software Development, Startups, topics
1 comment so far

I needed to write a few short pieces on some of the different management styles I have encountered in my corporate and professional travels. I want to define each of these management styles so that I can compare and contrast them, as well as serving as reference points for the longer articles on this topic which I am in the process of drafting.

I will begin with some of the “Letter Management Styles”, of which there are several. The purpose of this litany of alphabetic management styles is not to promote one over another; in fact, I don’t recommend adopting any of these naively. But nevertheless, many individual team members and managers will exhibit some behaviors from one of the above styles, and it is helpful to know what makes them tick. Finally, certain individuals may prefer to be managed as a Theory X or Theory Y type (Theory Z, which I will write about at a future date, is less likely in this case), and it is good to be able to recognize the signs. Moreover, some companies might be implicitly based on one style or another.

The first management style about which I will write is one which will be recognizable to every person, regardless of professional or personal background: “Theory X”.

Theory X is perhaps the oldest management style and is very closely related to the hierarchical, command-and-control model used by military organizations (of which I am intimately familiar).

One thing I can personnally attest to in regards to the Theory X management style is that it maintains the military organizations’ faith in the fact of the necessity of this approach, as (in the view of Theory X proponents) most people inherently dislike work and will avoid it if they can. Hence, in the Theory X management style, managers should coerce, control, direct, and threaten their workers in order to get the most out of them.

A statement that I recall from a conversation with a prototypical Theory X manager with whom I worked (in a prototypical Theory X organization) with was “people only do what you audit”.

Want to know more?

About the author.

I’m Paul Seibert, Editor of Boston’s Hub Tech Insider, a Boston focused technology blog. You can connect with me on LinkedIn, follow me on Twitter, even friend me on Facebook if you’re cool. I own and am trying to sell a dual-zoned, residential & commercial Office Building in Natick, MA. I have a background in entrepreneurship, ecommerce, telecommunications and software development, I’m the Director, Technical Projects at eSpendWise, I’m a serial entrepreneur and the co-founder of Tshirtnow.net.

What is Six Sigma? How is it used, and what does it have to do with the CMM? November 27, 2009

Posted by HubTechInsider in Agile Software Development, Definitions, Management, Manufacturing, Products, Project Management, Technology.
Tags: Agile Software Development, Management, Manufacturing, Project Management, Six Sigma
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What is Six Sigma? How is it used, and what does it have to do with the CMM?

Developed by Bill Smith at Motorola in 1986, Six Sigma is a management philosophy based on removing process variation. It was heavily influenced by preceding quality improvement methodologies such as Quality Control, TQM, and Zero Defects. Six Sigma is a registered service mark and trademark of Motorola Inc. As of 2006, Motorola had reported over $17 Billion in savings from their own employment of Six Sigma practices throughout their global enterprise. Early corporate adopters of Six Sigma who achieved well-publicized success through the application of six sigma best practices to their enterprises included Honeywell (previously known as AlliedSignal) and General Electric, where Jack Welch famously introduced and advocated the method. By the late 1990s, about two-thirds of the Fortune 500 organizations had begun Six Sigma initiatives with the aim of reducing costs and improving quality.

My own professional experiences with Six Sigma began in the early 1990’s (I had first read about it in a Forbes magazine article in 1988) when I worked in manufacturing environments at Mercedes-Benz USA’s plant in Tuscaloosa (Vance), Alabama as well as Phipher Optical Wire Product’s plant in Tuscaloosa, the same city where the University of Alabama is located. It was in these environments where I was tasked with learning about six sigma and spent many hours in classrooms and factory floor and management workgroups implementing and training for a six sigma blackbelt. Six Sigma Black Belts operate under Master Black Belts to apply Six Sigma methodology to specific projects. They devote 100% of their time to Six Sigma. They primarily focus on Six Sigma project execution, whereas what are known in the Six Sigma universe as Six Sigma Champions and Master Black Belts focus on identifying projects/functions for Six Sigma.

Implementing a Six Sigma program in a manufacturing environment means more than delivering defect-free product after final test or inspection. It also entails concurrently maintaining in-process yields around 99.9999998 percent, defective rates below 0.002 parts per million, and the virtual eradication of rework and scrap. Other Six Sigma characteristics include moving operating processes under statistical control, controlling input process variables as well as the more traditional output product variables, and maximizing equipment uptime and optimizing cycle time. In a six sigma organization, employees are trained and expected to assess their job functions with respect to how they improve the organization. They define their goals and quantify where they are currently, their status quo. Then they work to minimize the gap and achieve “six sigma” (in a statistical sense) by a certain date.

Six Sigma focuses on the control of a process to ensure that outputs are within six standard deviations (six sigma) from the mean of the specified goals. Six Sigma is oftentimes implemented using a system with which I have worked many times: define, measure, improve, analyze, and control (DMIAC). Sometimes this same system is referred to as define, measure, analyze and control, or DMAIC.

Define means to describe the process to be improved, usually through some sort of business process model.

Measure means to identify and capture relevant metrics for each aspect of the process model. I have been in classrooms where this is referred to as “Goal -> Question -> Metric”.

Improve obviously implies changing some aspect of the process so that beneficial changes are seen in the associated metrics, usually by attacking the aspect that will have the highest payback.

Analyze and Control means to use ongoing monitoring of the metrics to continuously revisit the model, observe the metrics, and refine the process as needed.

Although some organizations apparently strive to use Six Sigma as a part of their software quality improvement practices, the issue that often arises is finding an appropriate business process model for the software development effort that does not devolve into a highly artificial simulacrum of the waterfall SDLC (Software Development Life Cycle) process.

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About the author.

I’m Paul Seibert, Editor of Boston’s Hub Tech Insider, a Boston focused technology blog. You can connect with me on LinkedIn, follow me on Twitter, even friend me on Facebook if you’re cool. I own and am trying to sell a dual-zoned, residential & commercial Office Building in Natick, MA. I have a background in entrepreneurship, ecommerce, telecommunications and software development, I’m the Director, Technical Projects at eSpendWise, I’m a serial entrepreneur and the co-founder of Tshirtnow.net.

What is Scrum? How is it used to manage projects and teams? November 25, 2009

Posted by HubTechInsider in Agile Software Development, Definitions, Management, Project Management, Software.
Tags: Agile Software Development, developers, Management, produ, Project Management, Scrum, Software, Software Development, Startups, topics
1 comment so far

As I continue to move in the Boston software development / high tech job market and talk to more and more people in the area, I not only come across the term “Scrum” in many job descriptions, but it is a word that is frequently bandied about by both recruiters and hiring managers. It is clear that there is alot of confusion in the Boston area about what “Scrum” really is, and how it relates to Agile.

There is no substitute for the experience of running Scrum daily for years, as I have done. My heartfelt advice to anyone looking to adopt Scrum in their organization is to be flexible, take it easy on the cutsey names, and keep the daily meetings very brief. If you are the “ScrumMaster”, stay organized and lead the conversation around the room, notating all limiting factors, as that becomes your to-do list. Drop me a line with your own insights or comments on Scrum!

Scrum, as some people already know, is a project managemnt methodology named after a contentious point in a rugby match. The Scrum project management method enables self-organizing teams by encouraging verbal communication across all team members and project stakeholders. At its foundation, Scrum’s primary principle is that traditional problem definition solution approaches do not always work, and that a formalized discovery process is sometimes needed.

Scrum’s major project artifact is a dynamic list of prioritized work to be done. Completion of a largely fixed set of backlogged items occurs in a series of short (many of 30 days duration) iterations, or “sprints”.

Every day a brief meeting or “Scrum” is held in which project progress is explained, upcoming work is described, and impediments are raised. A brief planning session occurs at the start of each sprint to define the backlog items to be completed. A brief postmortem or heartbeat retrospective occurs at the end of each sprint.

A “ScrumMaster” (my advice is to never call yourself this in actual human life in an office of programmers and IT personnel…but know the job well and do it well nevertheless if you are the individual who finds themselves in this role) removes obstacles or impediments to each sprint. The ScrumMaster is not the leader of the team, as they are self-organizing, but rather acts as a productivity buffer between the team and any destabilizing influences.

Want to know more?

About the author.

I’m Paul Seibert, Editor of Boston’s Hub Tech Insider, a Boston focused technology blog. You can connect with me on LinkedIn, follow me on Twitter, even friend me on Facebook if you’re cool. I own and am trying to sell a dual-zoned, residential & commercial Office Building in Natick, MA. I have a background in entrepreneurship, ecommerce, telecommunications and software development, I’m the Director, Technical Projects at eSpendWise, I’m a serial entrepreneur and the co-founder of Tshirtnow.net.

The Twenty Laws of Testing Computer Software September 24, 2009

Posted by HubTechInsider in Agile Software Development, Project Management, Technology, Uncategorized.
Tags: Agile Software Development, developers, product management, Project Management, Software, Software Development
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As a software development project manager, I conduct, plan, organize and cajole the software engineering efforts in companies large and small. During the course of this work, I have never ceased to be amazed at the lack of understanding of both the importance of properly testing a software product or products, and the lack of knowledge around how to correctly conduct the testing effort.

This holds true in corporations both large and small that I have worked for during my fifteen year professional career. In my opinion, a Project Manager should have a complete understanding of the software testing process, and should also have experience not just scheduling and planning the resources conducting the testing effort, but actual personal testing experience.

It occurred to me earlier on in my career as a Project Manager that in order for me to be a better Project Manager, I was going to have to learn and research everything I could get my hands on about testing computer software. I took courses, I bought books and read them; I related the information I gathered to my experiences as a developer and in some of the ecommerce companies I had worked for and built early on in my career.

I found that this desire to learn the ins and outs of testing was over half the battle towards becoming a more accomplished PM. The Project Manager who appreciates the importance of testing, has been a tester, knows and respects the testers on the team, and has a deep seated, fundamental respect for testing is a Project Manager who commands respect from his project team.

One of my favorite books is “Microsoft Secrets”, by Michael Cusomano. In the book, he describes how early on in the history of the company, testing became a career path on the same level as programming. Knowing, from my extensive reading about Microsoft and Bill Gates, the high altar upon which programmers are placed at Microsoft, I found this to be extremely significant.

Great software development teams and great software engineering companies take the testing of their software seriously. They don’t cut corners, and they don’t have to, because they began with the end in mind.

So without much further adieu, here are my twenty laws for testing computer software. Look for me to expound upon each of the twenty laws in more detail on these pages very soon:

The sole goal of testing software is to find errors. Software testing is defined as the method of running a computer software program with the intent of discovering errors in the computer software program.

The definition of a good test case is that a good test case is one that has been written in such a manner that it has a great chance of discovery of previously undiscovered errors.

A successful test case is one that has been used to discover a previously undiscovered error.

Only a high quality software testing process will result in a high quality software testing effort.

Testing computer software is a professional discipline that must include skilled and trained professional computer software testers.

Someone must assume full responsibility for the improvement of the software testing process.

It is vital to foster a 100% positive, inclusive and team-oriented approach with a “test to break” mental attitude.

A test case for testing a computer software program must include a definition of the expected result of the computer software program being tested.

A computer software programmer should not test the computer software program they have coded themselves.

By extension, a computer software programming organization or engineering department should not test its own programs; This is the work of an independent testing organization.

The results of each test case should be reviewed with great care.

Test cases should be written in order to include unforeseen and invalid user inputs, as well as foreseen, valid user input.

Testing a computer software program to insure it performs as it should is only fifty percent of the testing effort. Another fifty percent of the testing effort should be expended in order to insure that the computer software program does not perform in ways in which it should not be performing.

Avoid one-time, spontaneous, disposable test cases.

A testing effort initiated under the assumption that no errors will be found will not be a successful computer software testing effort.

The proliferation of errors in a computer software program can be prevented through the employment of testing during the early stages of the software development lifecycle.

Software testing tools can be and should be a key element of a software testing effort.

Although perhaps counterintuitive, the probability that more errors will be found in a section of a computer software program in which errors have already been found increases with the number of errors discovered in that section of the computer software program.

Testing computer software well is an extremely mentally challenging exercise that requires creativity and perseverance from the testers in order to succeed.

The perception (oftentimes forwarded by management) that “not enough time exists to test the product properly, so let’s just ship it anyway”, because the “rewards of shipping the software outweigh the risks of shipping the software with undiscovered errors” may still be common practice in many software development and engineering organizations, yet such an attitude will lead to catastrophe, as software quality is intrinsically linked to customer requirements and customer satisfaction.

Want to know more?

About the author.

I’m Paul Seibert, Editor of Boston’s Hub Tech Insider, a Boston focused technology blog. You can connect with me on LinkedIn, follow me on Twitter, even friend me on Facebook if you’re cool. I own and am trying to sell a dual-zoned, residential & commercial Office Building in Natick, MA. I have a background in entrepreneurship, ecommerce, telecommunications and software development, I’m the Director, Technical Projects at eSpendWise, I’m a serial entrepreneur and the co-founder of Tshirtnow.net.

What is a “Use Case”? How is Use Case Modeling used to manage software development projects? June 28, 2009

Posted by HubTechInsider in Project Management.
Tags: Agile Software Development, Object Oriented Programming, OOP, product management, Project Management, Software, Software Development, Use Case Modeling, Use Cases
2 comments

The History of Use Case Modeling

A gentleman by the name of Ivar Jacobson invented what later has become known as Use Cases while working on telephony systems at Ericsson in the late 1960s. In the later 1980s, he introduced them to the OOP, or Object Oriented Programming, community. Within that community, Use Cases were instantly recognized as filling an important gap in the requirements process.

Alistair Cockburn (pronounced “Coburn”) constructed the Actors and Goals conceptual model while writing Use Case guides for the IBM Consulting Group in 1994, after studying under Ivar Jacobson in the early 1990s. Cockburn’s Actors and Goals conceptual model help to resolve much of the mystery of Use Cases and provided a guide on how to write and structure Use Cases. I was exposed to Jacobson and Cockburn’s Use Case modeling concepts while working as a consultant and business analyst for IBM in the 1990s. Cockburn’s IBM Consulting Group Actors and Goals conceptual model has circulated informally since 1995 at http://alistair.cockburn.us/ and later at http://www.usecases.org. The ideas finally were published in the Journal of Object Oriented Programming in 1997, in an article I read and loved written by Alistair Cockburn entitled “Structuring Use Cases with Goals“.

From the early 1990s through the end of the dotcom Boom around 1999, the ideas remained static, even though many in the OOP community still felt that there were some underlying loose ends in the theories behind Use Case Modeling. Alistair Cockburn, the originator of so many of the Use Case Modeling conceptual underpinnings, continued to teach and coach his Actors and Goals model, eventually gaining insights into why many in the OOP community were having such a hard time coming to grips with the ideas being presented. He finally released his new insights, complete with some of his resolutions to the unresolved questions forwarded to him regarding the Actors and Goals model, as the Stakeholders and Interests Model.

UML and Use Case Modeling: differences and coexistence

I personally, when introducing these concepts to a new Project Team, have often been asked, “What impact or overlap is there between the Use Case Modeling ideas and UML, or the Unified Modeling Language”?

A former colleague of Jacobson’s, Gunnar Overgaard, wrote most of the UML use case material and worked to preserve the heritage of Jacobson’s ideas. But it is well known within the OOP community that the UML standards group has within it a strong drawing-tools influence, which results in the loss of much of the textual, prose-based nature of Use Case Modeling.

Alistair Cockburn has written that he has met with both Gunnar Overgaard and Ivar Jacobson, and both assured him that Use Cases may fit within one of the UML ellipses,and hence the UML standard is agnostic when it comes to the Use Case Modeling ideas. The ideas forwarded by Alistair Cockburn are fully compatible with the UML 1.3 use case standard.

I think it is very important, however, to realize that if you only were to read the UML standard, which does not discuss the content or writing of a Use Case, you will not understand what a Use Case is or how to write or use it, and you will be led in the dangerous direction of thinking hat Use Cases are a graphical, as opposed to a textual, or prose, construct.

What is a “Use Case”, and how is Use Case Modeling used?

A Use Case is a fundamentally prose text description of a system’s behavior under various conditions. These conditions are primarily responses of the system to requests from one of the stakeholders of the system in question, usually referred to as a “Primary Actor”.

A Use Case represents a type of contract between the stakeholders of a system about the behavior of that system under these various conditions, or “States”. The Primary Actor initiates an action with the system in order to accomplish a task or achieve a goal. Myriad scenarios can unfold subsequently, and those scenarios depend upon the type of interactions or requests made by the Primary Actor and the conditions or states which accompany those requests. The use case succinctly codifies these various scenarios together into a presentable format.

Although use cases can take the form of flow charts, “Petri nets”, sequence charts or even programming languages, they are usually (and through general practice and agreement, best) presented in a prose text format. They are a way to communicate the intended behavior of a system (many times of course a software system) amongst members of a project team. It should not be necessary for project team members to have special training in order to interpret a well written use case. Use cases serve to encourage communication between project team members and also to stimulate discussion around contention points of a system’s intended behavior.

Some project teams may choose to document the requirements of a software system only through the use cases themselves. Other project teams may choose to have separate, traditional requirements documents. Many project teams may choose to provide both forms of documentation, use cases and requirements documents. I am of the school that use cases, requirements documents, and test cases form a triad that can help to unequivocally clarify the intended behavior of even the most complex software systems and also give the testing team the very best chance to perform their job with precision and efficiency.

The same basic rules of writing apply to all of the above listed approaches, even though different project teams will choose to write with unique levels of technical detail and completeness of description.

A well written use case should be easy to read and consists of sentences that are succinct and written in only one grammatical format, that being a simple action step. An action step is defined as an event in which one actor achieves a result or passes information or results to another system actor. An actor is defined as anyone or anything with behavior.

Reading a use case should not take more than a few minutes, although learning how to write a good use case is considerably harder. Three fundamental concepts apply to the writing of use cases, all three of which need to be mastered in order to become an effective use case writer:

Scope: What is the system being discussed, and what are the boundaries of the actions within that system to be described?
Primary Actor: Who is the user who hopes to achieve a goal through interaction with the system in question?
Level: Is the goal trying to be achieved by the Primary Actor primarily a high level goal or a low level goal?

The components of a use case consist of the following:

Stakeholder: someone with an interest at stake in the proper behavior of the system under discussion.

Preconditions and Guarantees: States or conditions that must be true both before and after the execution of the sequenced steps in the use case.

Main success scenario: A use case scenario in which no deviations from the expected behavior of the system are encountered.

Extensions: Extensions describe alternate scenarios or states that can be encountered during the execution of a use case. Numbering convention used in the writing of a use case indicate to the reader points at which deviations from the main success scenario are possible. For example, steps 2a and 2b are indicative of twin conditions that can be arrived at by the primary actor during the execution of step 2.

How can Use Case Modeling assist Project Managers in managing complex software development projects?

Use cases provide a scaffolding construct that can be used by Project Managers or Program Managers to link many of the requirements details used on a modern software development project. Information contained within different parts of the software requirements definition (SRD) such as user profile information, data formating requirements, validations, and business rules can be cross linked and cross referenced through the utilization of Use Case Modeling.

In addition to this linking of requirements for a software development project, Use Cases and Use Case Modeling can help structure the project planning process by providing a framework upon which to hang information such as development status, release dates, teams, and priorities. The project team can employ Use Cases to track results, in particular the design of the User Interface components and system tests. It is for these benefits that many people seem to consider Use Cases as at the center or hub of a giant wheel of requirements consisting of spokes for performance requirements, UI requirements, UI design, business rules, data formats, input / output protocols, and performance requirements. Use Cases are often thought of in the OOP community as being the central element of the requirements or even the central element of the software development project’s development process.

At what points in a software development project do Use Cases add value?

Use Case modeling has garnered such a popular and ardent following within the OOP community precisely because Use Cases have the ability to tell coherent stories about how the System under discussion will behave in use. The end Users of the System get to see just what this new System will be and what functionality it will possess. They have the option to react early or fine tune or reject the User Stories implied in the Use Cases themselves (“You mean we’ll have to do what in order to cancel an Order?”). As important as this reason is to the widespread adoption of Use Case Modeling, this is only one of the ways in which Use Cases can contribute value to a software development project, and quite possibly not the most significant.

The very first moment during the course of a typical software development project that the Use Cases create value is upon the naming of these Use Cases as the User Goals that the System will support. These User Goals, in the form of the collected and named Use Case Catalog, form a list which announces what the System will do, revealing the scope of the System, its purpose. The list of named User Goals becomes a communication device between the different Stakeholders on the software development project.

The list of User Goals will be reviewed and debated upon by user representatives, software development engineers, executives, and project managers, who will use this list to estimate the cost and complexity of the System by using it as a guide to the functionality under construction. The list of User Goals will be used to negotiate which functions will be built first and how the teams are to be set up. The User Goal list is a framework upon which complexity, status, cost and timing metrics may be hung. It collects diverse and myriad project information over the course of the life of a software development project.

Why you should perservere through the writing of the Use Case failure conditions

The second instance where Use Case Modeling adds value during the course of a software development project is when the people or person writing the Use Cases brainstorm all the things that could go wrong in the MSS (Main Success Scenario). When the Use Case writers list out all the failure conditions, and how the System under discussion will handle these error or failure conditions, this is the point in the process where the Project Team is likely to uncover something surprising, maybe even something that nobody, including the Use Case writers themselves or the primary stakeholders, ever thought about as requirements.

The writing of the Use Case failure conditions is probably one of the most simultaneously frustrating and rewarding steps in the process of writing the Use Cases. I highly encourage everyone ever involved in writing of a catalog of Use Cases to hold out until this part of the process. It is during the writing of the extensions, or failure conditions, that I regularly uncover a new User Goal, primary or secondary stakeholder, business rule or business process. Some of the most collaborative and productive design review sessions have resulted from discussions surrounding topics of how to handle these failure conditions. These design review sessions frequently end up involving a group of SMEs, or Subject Matter Experts, reviewing business processes or even questioning why it is things have been done a certain way inside a particular organization for so long. The process of trying to resolve what the System’s behavior should be during failure condition scenarios oftentimes is the process that generates the best requirements, even ex post facto to the formal discovery process.

If your Project Team skips over the writing of the Use Case failure conditions, then you will miss a valuable opportunity to catch many of the error conditions of the software application your Team is designing, leaving this vital Project task to a programmer who may discover them while typing a fragement of computer software code. This is far from the ideal juncture of your software development Project to be discovering new functions and business rules. If a lone programmer is left to his or her own devices in this type of scenario, with the business experts probably not around or gone home for the day, time pressure mounting, delivery schedules slipping, a programmer may be pressed, and understandably so, to just type whatever they think up at the moment instead of determining the correct functional behavior for the System they are programming, not necessarily designing.

I encourage Project Team to at least draw up one or two paragraph Use Case Briefs — for the very simple reason that Project Teams who write one-paragraph Use Cases save a lot of time by writing so little and already reap one of the major benefits of Use Cases. Project Teams who perservere through failure handling save mountains of time by finding subtle requirements early.

Want to know more?

About the author.

I’m Paul Seibert, Editor of Boston’s Hub Tech Insider, a Boston focused technology blog. You can connect with me on LinkedIn, follow me on Twitter, even friend me on Facebook if you’re cool. I own and am trying to sell a dual-zoned, residential & commercial Office Building in Natick, MA. I have a background in entrepreneurship, ecommerce, telecommunications and software development, I’m the Director, Technical Projects at eSpendWise, I’m a serial entrepreneur and the co-founder of Tshirtnow.net.

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