Word Begone: A Brand New Way to Document Requirements

Scot Witt, Tuesday, September 25, 2007 @ 8:54 am

So I grab my project notebook and amble into my first Agile Modeling session. I think me and my templates are ready. I read a coupla web pages on Agile and this should be a snap

What was that word? Hubris, yeah.

I had spent months getting those Word, Excel and PowerPoint templates ready- from the ones I stole (er, um, ah 'folk processed' as we folk music aficionados call it) to the ones I had to create myself.

Even today, I have my security blanket templates on my laptop and safely archived at home:

• Four versions of Vision/Charter documents
• Two Cost Benefit Analysis Finding templates
• Six Use Case Templates of varying color and table divider thicknesses
• Four Business Rule documenter boilerplates
• Three Excel Project Trackers
• Five model Project files
• Three Business Rule/Use Case Catalog blanks
• A wide variety of VISIO stencil items
• Two Decomp templates (on for PowerPoint and another in Word)
• Functional Requirements boiler (To Be and As Is States- a secret- you can use the same template for both!)
• A couple of horrendous templates that include one each of the above in monstrous detail.

As I sat in my first Agile session and discussion with our new Agile Coach, every instinct, every pat answer and smart alecky comment I usually make were absolutely, positively wrong:

On an Agile Team:

1. The weeks long process of generating a mound of paper or lots of files on a network share are over, Amigo. Both the Business and the Dev side only want 'just enough' documentation. Napkin diagrams, digital pictures of the white boards are fine. ('Horrors, developers actually writing stuff?' I thought to myself.)
2. The BA doesn't 'own' anything- it's sort of like Developer Socialism- everybody has a piece of the action and my not-yet-written documents. ('So, like, what the heck do I do?' I whined to myself)
3. There ain't no catalog of use cases- you can do the same thing with three line User Stories. 'User Stories? Yuh mean the customer actually does something other than yell at us?')
4. The developer actually talks to the end user! No translator (me, BA, out of job, must find waterfall/UML gig, soonest)

And none of those kewl templates and fancy-schmancy colorized customer-eye-popping stuff will ever be used.

Because we're putting all of this stuff on a wiki, the Coach told me.

I said, God Bless You.

I didn't sneeze, sez he.

That's what worries me, I responded.

Next Up: I use Word for the last time professionally.

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4. What makes a good requirement document for an agile project
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1. 

   amusing at the very least

   Comment by mike, Tuesday, October 2, 2007 @ 1:44 pm

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