“We need better approaches to understanding and managing software requirements, and Dean provides them in this book. He draws ideas from three very useful intellectual pools: classical management practices, Agile methods, and lean product development. By combining the strengths of these three approaches, he has produced something that works better than any one in isolation.”

–From the Foreword by Don Reinertsen, President of Reinertsen & Associates; author of Managing the Design Factory and leading expert on rapid product development

Effective requirements discovery and analysis is a critical best practice for serious application development. Until now, however, requirements and Agile methods have rarely coexisted peacefully. For many enterprises considering Agile approaches, the absence of effective and scalable Agile requirements processes has been a showstopper for Agile adoption. In Agile Software Requirements, Dean Leffingwell shows exactly how to create effective requirements in Agile environments.

• Part I presents the “big picture” of Agile requirements in the enterprise, and describes an overall process model for Agile requirements at the project team, program, and portfolio levels
• Part II describes a simple and lightweight, yet comprehensive model that Agile project teams can use to manage requirements
• Part III shows how to develop Agile requirements for complex systems that require the cooperation of multiple teams
• Part IV guides enterprises in developing Agile requirements for ever-larger “systems of systems,” application suites, and product portfolios

This book will help you leverage the benefits of Agile without sacrificing the value of effective requirements discovery and analysis. You’ll find proven solutions you can apply right now–whether you’re a software developer or tester, executive, project/program manager, architect, or team leader.

Contents

Part I: Overview: The Big Picture

Chapter 1 A Brief History of Software Requirements Methods

Chapter 2 The Big Picture of Agile Requirements

Chapter 3 Agile Requirements for the Team

Chapter 4 Agile Requirements for the Program

Chapter 5 Agile Requirements for the Portfolio

Interlude: Case Study: Tendril Platform

Part II: Agile Requirements for the Team

Chapter 6 User Stories

Chapter 7 Stakeholders, User Personas, and User Experiences

Chapter 8 Agile Estimating and Velocity

Chapter 9 Iterating, Backlog, Throughput, and Kanban

Chapter 10 Acceptance Testing

Chapter 11 Role of the Product Owner

Chapter 12 Requirements Discovery Toolkit

Part III: Agile Requirements for the Program

Chapter 13 Vision, Features, and Roadmap

Chapter 14 Role of the Product Manager

Chapter 15 The Agile Release Train

Chapter 16 Release Planning

Chapter 17 Nonfunctional Requirements

Chapter 18 Requirements Analysis Toolkit

Chapter 19 Use Cases

Part IV: Agile Requirements for the Portfolio

Chapter 20 Agile Architecture

Chapter 21 Rearchitecting with Flow

Chapter 22 Moving to Agile Portfolio Management

Chapter 23 Investment Themes, Epics, and Portfolio Planning

Chapter 24 Conclusion

Review

Praise for Agile Software Requirements

“In my opinion, there is no book out there that more artfully addresses the specific needs of agile teams, programs, and portfolios all in one. I believe this book is an organizational necessity for any enterprise.”

–Sarah Edrie, Director of Quality Engineering, Harvard Business School

“Agile Software Requirements and Mr. Leffingwell’s teachings have been very influential and inspiring to our organization. They have allowed us to make critical cultural changes to the way we approach software development by following the framework he’s outlined here. It has been an extraordinary experience.”

–Chris Chapman, Software Development Manager, Discount Tire

“This book supplies empirical wisdom connected with strong and very well-structured theory of succeeding with software projects of different scales. People new to agile, practitioners, or accomplished agilists–we all were waiting for such a book.”

–Oleksandr (Alex) Yakyma, Agile Consultant, www.enter-Agile.com

“This book presents practical and proven agile approaches for managing software requirements for a team, collaborating teams of teams, and all across the enterprise. However, this is not only a great book on agile requirements engineering; rather, Leffingwell describes the bigger picture of how the enterprise can achieve the benefits of business agility by implementing lean product development flow. His ‘Big Picture’ of agile requirements is an excellent reference for any organization pursuing an intrinsically lean software development operational mode. Best of all, we’ve applied many of these principles and practices at Nokia (and even helped create some of them), and therefore we know they work.

–Juha-Markus Aalto, Agile Change Program Manager, Nokia Corporation

“This pragmatic, easy-to-understand, yet thought-provoking book provides a hands-on guide to addressing a key problem that enterprises face: How to make requirements practices work effectively in large-scale agile environments. Dean Leffingwell’s focus on lean principles is refreshing and much needed!”

–Per Kroll, author, and Chief Architect for Measured Improvements, IBM

“Agile programming is a fluid development environment. This book serves as a good starting point for learning.”

–Brad Jackson, SAS Institute Inc.

“Dean Leffingwell captures the essence of agile in its entirety, all the way from the discrete user story in the ‘trenches’ to complex software portfolios at the enterprise level. The narrative balances software engineering theory with pragmatic implementation aspects in an easy-to-understand manner. It is a book that demands to be read in a single sitting.”

–Israel Gat, http://theAgileexecutive.com, @Agile_exec on Twitter

“An incredibly complete, clear, concise, and pragmatic reference for agile software development. Much more than mere guidelines for creating requirements, building teams, and managing projects, this reference work belongs on the bookshelf of anyone and everyone involved with not only agile processes but software development in general.”

–R.L. Bogetti, Lead System Designer, Baxter Healthcare

“This book covers software requirements from the team level to program and portfolio levels, including the architecture management and a consistent framework for the whole enterprise. We have practiced the multi-team release planning and the enterprise-level architecture work with kanban and achieved instant success in our organization. Combining the principles of the product development flow with the current large-scale agile and lean software development is a really novel concept. Well worth reading and trying out the ideas here.”

–Santeri Kangas, Chief Software Architect, and Gabor Gunyho, Lean Change Agent, F-Secure Corp.

“Dean Leffingwell and his Agile Release Train (ART) concept guides us from teamlevel agile to enterprise-level agile. The ART concept is a very powerful tool in planning and managing large software programs and helps to identify and solve potential organizational roadblocks–early.”

–Markku Lukkarinen, Head of Programs, Nokia Siemens Networks

About the Author

Dean Leffingwell, a thirty-year software industry veteran, has spent his career helping software teams achieve their goals. A renowned methodologist, author, coach, entrepreneur, and executive, he founded Requisite, Inc., makers of RequisitePro, and served as its CEO. As vice president at Rational Software (now part of IBM), he led the commercialization of the Rational Unified Process. As an independent consultant and as an advisor to Rally Software, he has helped entrepreneurial teams and large, distributed, multinational corporations implement Agile methods at scale. He is the author of Scaling Software Agility: Best Practices for Large Enterprises (Addison-Wesley, 2007) and is the lead author of Managing Software Requirements, Second Edition (Addison-Wesley, 2003), which has been translated into five languages.