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Introduction to Stage Gates A stage gates process (also known as phase gate) is a common control mechanism associated with IT projects in corporate IT departments.  A series of conceptual checklists are defined, such that unless all of the component activities have taken place, the project may not be allowed to proceed to the next stage. [...]

Behaviour Driven Development (BDD) enhanced with ScopeMaster An overview of BDD BDD is a development methodology (and tooling) designed to improve the communication between business and software technical community, in particular it addresses the challenge of simplifying scenario testing. The foundation behind BDD is the Gherkin feature file. The feature file has a predefined structure and [...]

When considering the cost of software delay, or equivalently, the value of early delivery, you need to revert to the business case.   If the software gives the organisation a first-mover competitive advantage in a market place, this will come with considerable rewards.  If a delay means being second rather than first to market, then being [...]

Update 2023 This article was originally written  in late 2018.  Now in 2023 more information is being reported.    April 2023 update at Computer Weekly What we know now is that there were "some issues" i.e bugs that affected different groups of clients in different ways.  It took them at least 7 months to resolve [...]

(150/16 , nearly 10) It's a real delight to see a genuine testimonial from a highly experienced IT professional such as Lonnie. I wrote my first commercial program in 1968 and have worked in software engineering and software engineering management most of the time since then. I joined NCR Corporation in 1980 and worked for them, [...]

Refining User Stories Refining user stories is the process of improving, splitting and clarifying each user story.  The detail and clarity of each user story should be revisited.  Backlog grooming is a term that generally refers to the higher level process of prioritising user stories.  Both refinement [...]

Software Requirements Quality Requirements quality is a matter of some discussion amongst software requirements professionals.  Here are four considered views on software requirements quality, that is what makes for a good requirement or a good set of requirements. Why does requirements quality matter? It is often useful to look at things in [...]

For a one-off quality check, you can export from any one of these tools as a csv and import directly into Scopemaster to get your quality report.  You can work interactively from there and/or import the improved stories back into your favourite tool below: Jira : From most screens you can export as CSV (Issue Id, Issue [...]