Announcing an Upcoming Book on Agile Requirements

As readers of this blog know, I’ve been using my previous book, Scaling Software Agility: Best Practices for Large Enterprises, as a source reference to help guide large-scale enterprises in becoming more agile in their software development projects. In the course of many engagements with these large enterprises, a recurring theme keeps popping up, “How do I handle requirements at scale in an agile environment?” It’s a good question that deserves a thorough treatment of the subject and, hopefully, some practical answers to that question. I’ve been addressing some of the answers in various blog posts and whitepapers (see Agile Requirements category and A Lean and Scalable Requirements Model for Agile Enterprises.) Also, I’ve written fairly extensively on the requirements topic in the past, in Managing Software Requirements: First and Second Editions, from Addison-Wesley.

While thinking about this issue for the last few years, I’ve accumulated a lot of practical approaches to the question of managing requirements for big systems in an agile world. In addition, several agilists have been thinking about this problem as well and have made substantial contributions to the art. Although I tried to duck the issue, it just wouldn’t go away, so I’ve decided to write another book (with help from collaborators such as Mauricio Zamora, Pete Behrens, Jennifer Fawcett and others) that focuses specifically on this matter. I’ve tentatively titled the book Agile Requirements: Lean Requirements Practices for Teams, Programs and the Enterprise and, with help from my co-author, Don Widrig, it should be published by Addison-Wesley sometime early next year.

As in all things agile, it isn’t completely nailed down yet but here is the Table of Contents that I’m working from now. A lot of the book exists in draft form, so don’t hesitate to contact me if you’re interested in helping me shape this book for final publication. In future posts, I’m going to push various whitepapers and snippets to gather early feedback, and to help anyone who might actually find this stuff helpful between now and the time the book is published.

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Preliminary Table of Contents

Agile Requirements: Lean Requirements Practices for Teams, Programs and the Enterprise

by Dean Leffingwell, with Don Widrig

Forward

Preface

About the Author

Front Matter

·      Preface

·      How to Read this Book

·      Acknowledgements

Part I – Overview: The Big Picture

1.             A Brief History of Software Requirements Methods

2.             The Big Picture

3.             Agile Requirements for the Project Team

4.             Agile Requirements for the Program

5.             Agile Requirements for the Portfolio

Interlude Case Study: Tendril Residential Energy Ecosystem

Part II – Agile Requirements for the Team

6.             User Stories

7.              Stakeholders, User Personas and User Experiences

8.             Estimating and Velocity

9.             Iterating

10.          Acceptance Tests

11.          Role of the Product Owner

12.          Requirements Discovery Toolkit

Part III – Agile Requirements for the Program

13.          Vision, Features, and the Solution Roadmap

14.          Role of the Product Manager

15.          Release Planning and Execution

16.          Nonfunctional Requirements

17.          Requirements Analysis Toolkit

18.          Use Cases

Part IV – Agile Requirements for the Portfolio

19.          Systems Engineering

20.          Business Modeling

21.          Epics and Agile Portfolio Management

22. Epics and Enterprise Architecture