"If you haven't had the good fortune to be coached by a strong leader or product coach, this book can help fill that gap and set you on the path to success." - Marty Cagan How do you know that you are making a product or service that your customers want? How do you ensure that you are improving it over time? How do you guarantee that your team is creating value for your customers in a way that creates value for your business? In this book, you'll learn a structured and sustainable approach to continuous discovery that will help you answer each of these questions, giving you the confidence to act while also preparing you to be wrong. You'll learn to balance action with doubt so that you can get started without being blindsided by what you don't get right. If you want to discover products that customers love-that also deliver business results-this book is for you.

"I spend much time helping organizations capture requirements and even more time helping them recover from not capturing requirements. Many of them have gone through some motions regarding requirements as if they were sleepworking. It's time to wake up and do it right-and this book is going to be their alarm clock." - Jerry Weinberg, author of numerous books on productivity enhancement "In today's complex, fast-paced software development environment, collaboration-the intense peer-to-peer conversations that result in products, decisions, and knowledge sharing-is absolutely essential to success. But all too often, attempts to collaborate degenerate into agonizing meetings or ineffectual bull sessions. Ellen's wonderful book will help you bridge the gap-turning the agony of meetings into the ecstasy of effective collaboration." - Jim Highsmith, a pioneer in adaptive software development methods "Requirements by Collaboration presents a wealth of practical tools and techniques for facilitating requirements development workshops. It is suitable-no, essential reading-for requirements workshop facilitators. It will help both technical people and customer representatives participate in these critical contributions to software success." - Karl Wiegers, Principal Consultant, Process Impact, author of Software Requirements "The need for this particular book, at this particular time, is crystal clear. We have entered a new age where software development must be viewed as a form of business problem solving. That means direct user participation in developing 'requirements, ' or more accurately, in jointly working the business problem. That, in turn, means facilitated sessions. In this book, Ellen Gottesdiener provides a wealth of practical ideas for ensuring that you have exactly the right stuff for this all-important area of professional art." - Ronald G. Ross, Principal, Business Rule Solutions, LLC, Executive Editor, www.BRCommunity.com "Gottesdiener's years of software development experience coupled with her straight-forward writing style make her book a perfect choice for either a senior developer or a midlevel project manager. In addition to her technical experience, her knowledge of group dynamics balance the book by educating the reader on how to manage conflict and personality differences within a requirements team-something that is missing from most requirements textbooks...It is a required 'handbook' that will be referred to again and again." - Kay Christian, ebusiness Consultant, Conifer, Colorado "Requirements by Collaboration is a 'must read' for any system stakeholder. End users and system analysts will learn the significant value they can add to the systems development process. Management will learn the tremendous return they may receive from making a modest time/people investment in facilitated sessions. Facilitators will discover ways to glean an amazing amount of high-quality information in a relatively brief time." - Russ Schwartz, Computer System Quality Consultant, Global Biotechnology Firm "In addition to showing how requirements are identified, evaluated, and confirmed, Ellen provides important guidance based on her own real-world experience for creating and managing the workshop environment in which requirements are generated. This book is an engaging and invaluable resource for project teams and sponsors, both business and IT, who are committed to achieving results in the most productive manner possible." - Hal Thilmony, Senior Manager, Business Process Improvement (Finance), CiscoSystems, Inc. "Project managers should read this book for assistance with planning the requirements process. Experienced facilitators will enrich their knowledge. New facilitators can use this book to get them up to speed and become more effective in less time." - Rob Stroober, Competence Development Manager and Project Manager, Deloitte &Touche Consultdata, The Netherlands "While many books discuss the details of software requirement artifacts (for example, use cases), Ellen's new book zeros in on effective workshop techniques and tools used to gather the content of these artifacts. As a pioneer in requirements workshops, she shares her real-life experiences in a comprehensive and easy-to-read book with many helpful examples and diagrams." - Bill Bird, Aera Energy LLC "Requirements by Collaboration is absolutely full of guidance on the most effective ways to use workshops in requirements capture. This book will help workshop owners and facilitators to determine and gain agreement on a sound set of requirements, which will form a solid foundation for the development work that is to follow." - Jennifer Stapleton, Software Process Consultant and author of DSDM: The Methodin Practice "This book provides an array of techniques within a clear, structured process, along with excellent examples of how and when to use them. It's an excellent, practical, and really useful handbook written by a very experienced author!" - Jean-Anne Kirk, Director DSDM Consortium and IAF Professional Development "Ellen has written a detailed, comprehensive, and practical handbook for facilitating groups in gathering requirements. The processes she outlines give the facilitator tools to bring together very different perspectives from stakeholders elegantly and with practical, useable results." - Jo Nelson, Principal, ICA Associates, Inc., Chair, IAF (2001-2002) Requirements by Collaboration: Workshops for Defining Needs focuses on the human side of software development--how well we work with our customers and teammates. Experience shows that the quality and degree of participation, communication, respect, and trust among all the stakeholders in a project can strongly influence its success or failure. Ellen Gottesdiener points out that such qualities are especially important when defining user requirements and she shows in this book exactly what to do about that fact. Gottesdiener shows specifically how to plan and conduct requirements workshops. These carefully organized and facilitated meetings bring business managers, technical staff, customers, and users into a setting where, together, they can discover, evolve, validate, verify, and agree upon their product needs. Not only are their requirements more effectively defined through this collaboration, but the foundation is laid for good teamwork throughout the entire project. Other books focus on how to build the product right. Requirements by Collaboration focuses instead on what must come first--the right product to build.

Printed in full color. Faced with a software project of epic proportions? Tired of over-committing and under-delivering? Enter the dojo of the agile samurai, where agile expert Jonathan Rasmusson shows you how to kick-start, execute, and deliver your agile projects. Combining cutting-edge tools with classic agile practices, The Agile Samurai gives you everything you need to deliver something of value every week and make rolling your software into production a non-event. Get ready to kick some software project butt. By learning the ways of the agile samurai you will discover: how to create plans and schedules your customer and your team can believe in what characteristics make a good agile team and how to form your own how to gather requirements in a fraction of the time using agile user stories what to do when you discover your schedule is wrong, and how to look like a pro correcting it how to execute fiercely by leveraging the power of agile software engineering practices By the end of this book you will know everything you need to set up, execute, and successfully deliver agile projects, and have fun along the way. If you're a project lead, this book gives you the tools to set up and lead your agile project from start to finish. If you are an analyst, programmer, tester, usability designer, or project manager, this book gives you the insight and foundation necessary to become a valuable agile team member. The Agile Samurai slices away the fluff and theory that make other books less-than-agile. It's packed with best practices, war stories, plenty of humor and hands-on tutorial exercises that will get you doing the right things, the right way. This book will make a difference.

Great products are built upon the three pillars of strong customer focus, a culture of agility, and team empowerment. This book explains how to drive product innovation and deliver products that customers love. It's a guide for innovators, leaders, and entrepreneurs, and it includes several interviews with startup CEOs and real-life use cases.

Master IBM’s Breakthrough DAD Process Framework for Succeeding with Agile in Large, Complex, Mission-Critical IT Projects It is widely recognized that moving from traditional to agile approaches to build software solutions is a critical source of competitive advantage. Mainstream agile approaches that are indeed suitable for small projects require significant tailoring for larger, complex enterprise projects. In Disciplined Agile Delivery, Scott W. Ambler and Mark Lines introduce IBM’s breakthrough Disciplined Agile Delivery (DAD) process framework, which describes how to do this tailoring. DAD applies a more disciplined approach to agile development by acknowledging and dealing with the realities and complexities of a portfolio of interdependent program initiatives. Ambler and Lines show how to extend Scrum with supplementary agile and lean strategies from Agile Modeling (AM), Extreme Programming (XP), Kanban, Unified Process (UP), and other proven methods to provide a hybrid approach that is adaptable to your organization’s unique needs. They candidly describe what practices work best, why they work, what the trade-offs are, and when to consider alternatives, all within the context of your situation. Disciplined Agile Delivery addresses agile practices across the entire lifecycle, from requirements, architecture, and development to delivery and governance. The authors show how these best-practice techniques fit together in an end-to-end process for successfully delivering large, complex systems--from project initiation through delivery. Coverage includes Scaling agile for mission-critical enterprise endeavors Avoiding mistakes that drive poorly run agile projects to chaos Effectively initiating an agile project Transitioning as an individual to agile Incrementally building consumable solutions Deploying agile solutions into complex production environments Leveraging DevOps, architecture, and other enterprise disciplines Adapting your governance strategy for agile projects Based on facts, research, and extensive experience, this book will be an indispensable resource for every enterprise software leader and practitioner--whether they’re seeking to optimize their existing agile/Scrum process or improve the agility of an iterative process.

Enhance Fundamental Value and Establish Competitive Advantage with Leadership Agility Whether you’re leading an organization, a team, or a project, Stand Back and Deliver gives you the agile leadership tools you’ll need to achieve breakthrough levels of performance. This book brings together immediately usable frameworks and step-by-step processes that help you focus all your efforts where they matter most: delivering business value and building competitive advantage. You’ll first discover how to use the authors’ Purpose Alignment Model to make better up-front decisions about where to invest limited resources—and how to filter out activities that don’t drive market leadership. Next, you’ll learn how to collaborate in new ways that unleash your organization’s full talents for innovation. The authors offer the Context Leadership Model for understanding the unique challenges of any project, and they help you tailor your leadership approach to address them. You’ll find a full chapter on organizing information to promote more effective, value-driven decision-making. Finally, drawing on decades of experience working with great leaders, the authors focus on a critical issue you’ll face over and over again: knowing when to step up and lead, and when to stand back and let your team produce results. Coverage includes Effectively evaluating, planning, and implementing large system projects Reducing resistance to process improvements Bringing greater agility to the way you manage products, portfolios, and projects Identifying the tasks that don’t create enough value to be worth your time Developing the forms of collaboration that are crucial to sustaining innovation Mitigating project risks more effectively—especially those associated with complexity and uncertainty Refocusing all decision-making on delivering value to the organization and the marketplace Making decisions at the right time to leverage the best information without stifling progress