Requirements Across the Software Development Lifecycle

Yesterday, I attended a seminar by IBM to show off some of their Rational Software products. Of course, I focused more on the best practices of requirements management and use cases best practices than the actual software. After introducing RUP, Rational Unified Processes, they explained how requirements fits into and drives portions of the lifecycle. Coming from the project manager point of view, things were starting to get interesting.

Rational Unified Process

As you can see, it's a little different than the PMBOK process.

PMBOK Process Overlap

The seminar also went into the various benefits of diagram version of use cases versus declarative (written out text version).

Use Case Types

Image

• Can show within context
• Goal oriented
• Action use is focus
• Broad perspective

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[TEXT]

Declarative

• "The system shall"
  
• System oriented
  
• Easily converted to test cases and other documentation
  
• Small perspective