PowerStory Blog

Design Spikes — Fitting Big-Picture UX Into Agile Development | Smashing UX Design

See on Scoop.it – Wireframes and UI, UX

This article explores design spikes, an effective tool for designers who have holistic design questions whose answers could potentially invalidate the work being tackled by the team.

See on uxdesign.smashingmagazine.com

LukeW | New Layouts for the Multi-Device Web

See on Scoop.it – Wireframes and UI, UX

LukeW Ideation + Design provides resources for mobile and Web product design and strategy including presentations, workshops, articles, books and more on usability, interaction design and visual design.

See on www.lukew.com

Psychology — A Customer Development Process for WordPress Developers

See on Scoop.it – Wireframes and UI, UX

This article explains how you can build something that your users will actually want to buy.

See on www.smashingmagazine.com

What Is User Experience Design? Overview, Tools And Resources | Smashing UX Design

See on Scoop.it – Wireframes and UI, UX

Websites and Web applications have become progressively more complex as our industry’s technologies and methodologies advance. What used to be a one-way static medium has evolved into a very rich and interactive experience.

See on uxdesign.smashingmagazine.com

Embracing SCRUM and CMMI in TFS 2012

See on Scoop.it – Requirements Definition and Management

This article discusses how strongly Team Foundation Server 2012 supports the implementation of SCRUM and CMMI processes

See on www.dotnetcurry.com

Stop the insanity of multiple copies of your requirements specifications floating around in eMail inboxes

See on Scoop.it – Requirements Definition and Management

If you are like most people I talk to, you hate all the versions and copies of requirements documents that fly around within emails. The good news is that the advancements in cloud based solutions …

See on blog.power-story.com

Stop the insanity of multiple copies of your requirements specifications floating around in eMail inboxes

If you are like most people I talk to, you hate all the versions and copies of requirements documents that fly around within emails. The good news is that the advancements in cloud based solutions for office in the form of skydrive and office 365, really provide you with the opportunity to eliminate this pain point.

• With SkyDrive, everyone has access to the same version of the requirements documents you produce!
• Pass around the links…not the documents!
• Edit the Documents at the same time! Yes Really!
• You can even view and edit these documents directly in your browser, but you still have the option of working offline using your desktop version of office.
• When you create links between documents (e.g for traceability) those links won’t get broken even if you move the document to another folder in skydrive.

The one thing skydrive does not really offer is what I would refer to as “requirements management” capabilities. By this I mean the ability to sort and organize your requirements/features lists by additional data such as “priority”, “status”, “owner” etc. There are a few options to consider here.

Option 1: Spreadsheet

One obvious option is to use a spreadsheet to manage a list of the “titles” of features or requirements, with columns for “priority” etc. You might also want to create a column that has links to the relevant detailed spec documents.

Option 2: Team Foundation Server / or equivalent

Another solution is to use Team Foundation Server/Service for your requirements management (or something similar) to manage this high level list of requirement/feature “titles” as workitems, and then insert links to the documents. I prefer this option, as in my view provides more from a project management point of view.

Your team will take a little bit of time getting used to the idea of not emailing documents, but emailing links, but we have found this approach really does eliminate a lot of wasted time and improves collaboration across our team.

Cheers,
Martin Crisp
CEO, PowerStory