Better Software Magazine

Projects collapse in a variety of ways and for a variety of reasons. Fortunately there are things you can do to stabilize and rebuild your project before the dust settles. With these expert tips and a little elbow grease, you'll have the tools you'll need to renovate almost any failing project.

Grandma cooked her roast a certain way, and now you're repeating the process without knowing why you have to trim the ends off an uncooked roast even though the pan is adequately sized. Relic processes in many organzations fall trap to this mindset since the reason behind the action lost its meaning long ago. Lee Copeland calls these "IF ..., THEN ..." processes. When the organization loses sight of the IF responsible for the action, then you're left with what Lee describes as "a process without a context; a rule without a reason."

In this issue's Last Word, Dion Johnson calculates your job's worth when requirements are removed from the equation.

Writing requirements purely top-down or only bottom-up is risky to say the least. The devil's in the details, and those details are likely to be missed when working from a single direction. What if you could tackle your requirements from both directions by incorporating use cases and user centered design? Learn how balancing your approach to writing requirements can result in more detailed, pragmatic documentation.