Blog

Large software projects are highly prone to delay and even failure.  For success, careful planning, effective communication, and a high level of technical expertise and focus on quality are needed to overcome many of these challenges. The Standish Chaos Report  and the CISQ group's Cost of Poor Quality Report 2022 both [...]

ScopeMaster can help increase adoption of many of the seven business analysis principles for agile software work, The Seven Business Analysis Principles for Agile The IIBA's Agile Extension to the BABOK® Guide presents seven Business Analysis principles for Agile work: See the whole. Think as a customer. Analyze to determine what [...]

Software Rework Explained Software rework, is the consequential work that arises from altering requirements, designs, code and tests after some work has already been started.  On most software undertakings this represents 30-50% of all activity.  We generally exclude bug fixing from the category of software rework.  Rework generally describes the extra [...]

The Meaning and Origin of "Technical Debt" The metaphor of Technical Debt (TD) in the context of software was coined by Ward Cunningham who at the time was working on coding a financial system. He used the metaphor to explain to his financial colleagues the reasoning for refactoring and rewriting parts of codes as the knowledge [...]

Here are some insights into the value of finding requirements defects  before design or coding. To a software development team it is very valuable to find defects early.  Even better still, is to prevent defects altogether.  Excellent requirements are an effective form of defect prevention and rework prevention.   An ambiguous requirement [...]

Story splitting - refinement to an optimal granularity An apparently small story may turn out to be much bigger than expected. Only by refinement or story splitting can you discover this. Story splitting can be done early or just before the preceding sprint. We recommend doing it as early as possible [...]

Requirements Elicitation is about discovering the real business requirements and the system requirements of any software endeavour. It is first about discovering what is needed and then about articulating the distilled discoveries into a artefacts that can be used as the basis for describing what needs to be done.  It is unusual that the real [...]

Let us look at how and why we might want to quality assure user stories.  Poor user stories lead to unnecessary meetings, waste and rework.  Improving user story as early as possible in the development lifecycle is an effective way of minimising waste and rework. Quality assurance is a systematic [...]

Independent Verification and Validation of Software Projects IV & V stands for Independent Validation and Verification. Definition: According to NIST IV&V is:  A comprehensive review, analysis, and testing, (software and/or hardware) performed by an objective third party to confirm (i.e., verify) that the requirements are correctly defined, and to confirm (i.e., validate) that the system correctly [...]

In this article we explore the results of using the user story analysis tool, ScopeMaster on an example set of user stories (access originals here). The stories we have used are published by Mike Cohn on the Mountain Goat website, they describe the functions of an interactive website to be built. About the Example User [...]

Backlog grooming, or backlog refinement is the work that is done to analyse and improve and estimate user stories, epics and technical tasks yet to be done by the team.  When a software team has a list of work to do, this is known as the backlog.  Backlog grooming is the work done by the team, [...]