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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.

So what happens when interaction designers are put to work on an Agile process? Meet "Dan Means," a system administrator persona developed to represent and emphasize customer requirements. Find out how one development team used him and other personas to blend interaction design and Agile development to deliver a product the customer really wanted.

Trying to communicate with businesspeople about requirements can make you feel like you're from another planet. Using concrete examples expressed as storytests to drive the development of a system can help bring you back into the same orbit. Discover ways to introduce this process on your next project.

This paper provides a review of the projects that use business rules engine (BRE) implementation. The article emphasizes the importance of the rules taxonomy definition and concludes with a discussion about the estimate approach for this type of project.

Connect with an expert to learn how to work smarter and discover new ways to uncover more defects. Michael Bolton leads us further down the path to successful critical thinking by teaching us the kinds of questions we should ask to obtain the most useful information.