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Software Requirements Essentials
Software Development Pearls
The Thoughtless Design of Everyday Things
Software Requirements
More About Software Requirements
Successful Business Analysis Consulting
Practical Project Initiation
Peer Reviews in Software
Creating a Software Engineering Culture
The Reconstruction
Pearls from Sand

Articles

More than 170 articles on software requirements, business analysis, product design, project management, culture, quality, freelancing, writing for publication, giving presentations, and other topics are available at Karl's Medium.com account.

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The Thoughtless Design of Everyday Things Software Requirements Essentials: Core Practices for Successful Business Analysis by Karl Wiegers and Candase Hokanson is a concise and highly readable book that describes 20 requirements practices that every software team should perform. They are valuable for both agile and traditional project teams. These core practices help project and product teams understand the business problem, engage the right participants, articulate effective solutions, communicate information among stakeholders, implement the right functionality in the right sequence, and adapt to change. If you don't have time to read one of the big books on requirements or business analysis, read this short one.

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The Thoughtless Design of Everyday Things Software Development Pearls: Lessons from Fifty Years of Software Experience presents 60 lessons I've learned throughout my career, both from my personal experience and from some 150 companies I've worked with as a consultant and trainer. The lessons address six areas that are key to software development success: requirements, design, project management, culture and teamwork, quality, and process improvement. Studying these experience-based insights can save you the time and pain of climbing every learning curve yourself.

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The Thoughtless Design of Everyday Things Have you ever noticed how many products appear to be designed by someone who has never used a product of that kind before? The Thoughtless Design of Everyday Things presents more than 160 examples of thoughtlessly-designed products, along with nearly 50 examples of particularly good designs. These poor designs reveal 70 insightful design lessons, which are aligned with 9 fundamental principles of good design. This book will be insightful and thought-provoking for both new and experienced designers, as well as interested and curious consumers.

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Software Requirements Software Requirements, 3rd Edition (co-authored with Joy Beatty) won an Award of Excellence from the Society for Technical Communication. Covering the full scope of requirements development and management, this comprehensive good practice guide can help anyone in the business analysis role elicit, analyze, document, validate, and manage the requirements for any project. Topics include:
  • The role of the business analyst and the skills and knowledge needed
  • Elicitation techniques
  • Writing clear and effective requirements
  • Quality attributes and other nonfunctional requirements
  • Visual analysis modeling techniques
  • Data requirements, including specifying reports and dashboards
  • Requirements prioritization, reuse, and prototyping
  • Requirements for agile projects and how to apply specific practices to agile projects
  • Requirements for specific classes of projects: business process automation, packaged solutions, enhancement and replacement, outsourced, business analytics, and real-time systems
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More About Software Requirements More About Software Requirements: Thorny Issues and Practical Advice addresses many questions that requirements analysts ask over and over again, most of which are not covered well in the current books on software requirements. Some of these thorny problems don't have perfect solutions, but the book offers practical options and ways to select the best approach in a given situation. Chapters cover points of confusion around use cases, how to optimize customer involvement, different ways to represent requirements knowledge, and some key issues regarding requirements management. There's a wealth of advice on how to write excellent software requirements at an appropriate level of detail and without unnecessary design constraints.

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Successful Business Analysis Consulting Successful Business Analysis Consulting: Strategies and Tips for Going It Alone presents countless insights I've acquired in more than 20 years as an independent consultant. This is the kind of information I wish I had had before I decided to give consulting a try. If you have questions about setting prices, negotiating agreements, dealing with difficult clients, partnering with other consultants, giving presentations, writing for publication, or generating revenue while you sleep, this book has answers. Even if you aren't an independent consultant, you'll find a lot of valuable information in this book.

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Practical Project Initiation Practical Project Initiation: A Handbook with Tools addresses the process of conceiving, approving, and launching a new project. This book describes many actions that lay the foundation for a successful project. Both experienced and novice project managers will find the practices described here to be valuable. Topics covered include: defining project success criteria and product release criteria, project chartering, risk management, lessons learned and project retrospectives, metrics, and many others. Each chapter includes several practice activities and worksheets to help you begin applying the techniques immediately. A companion page provides numerous templates, procedure descriptions, spreadsheet tools, and other work aids to help you launch your next project more effectively.

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Peer Reviews in Software Peer Reviews in Software: A Practical Guide is a concise description of software peer reviews and inspections. It covers the inspection process in some detail, but it also describes a variety of other review types that cover a spectrum of formality. Several chapters address the cultural and interpersonal aspects of peer reviews, installing a review program in an organization, and recording and using inspection metrics. The emphasis is on a simple, practical approach to these important quality techniques that any organization can apply.

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Creating Software Engineering Culture Creating a Software Engineering Culture won a Productivity Award from Software Development magazine. A healthy software engineering culture is one in which managers and practitioners share a commitment to building quality software through the application of effective and sensible software processes. The book describes 14 cultural principles that I think are important in guiding how software is built. If you share my belief that these principles are important, you'll apply technical and managerial practices that I think will lead to superior software.

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The Reconstruction In my forensic mystery novel, The Reconstruction, a forensic sculptor is shocked to discover she has a close personal connection to the subject ofher latest forensic facial reconstruction. She is then driven to identify the victim, confirm their relationship, and deliver justice for her death. Totally different from my technical books, The Reconstruction is an engaging mystery that will hold your attention. It was also the most fun I ever had writing something.

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Pearls from Sand Pearls from Sand: How Small Encounters Lead to Powerful Lessons is a memoir of life lessons that I learned from otherwise ordinary conversations and experiences. Each of the 37 chapters describes a powerful life lesson, how I learned it, how I've used it, and how you can use it to enhance your own life. The lessons are grouped into 6 categories: personal pearls, interpersonal pearls, motivational pearls, cautionary pearls, practical pearls, and professional pearls.

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