Requirements risks are among the most insidious risks threatening software projects. Whether it is having unclear requirements, lack of customer involvement in requirements development, or defective requirements, these troubles are a major culprit in projects that go awry. As requirements expert and agile coach Ellen Gottesdiener explains, agile practice can go a long way in mitigating the top five requirements risks.

Aspect-oriented requirements engineering (AORE) is a new methodology that can help us to further improve the analysis, structure, and cost of development of software requirements. The second part of this two-part series focuses on the AORE specification techniques.

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.

As software professionals, we all care about quality. We focus our efforts on building quality into the code and testing to assess quality and find errors before our customers do. However, there is an important element of quality that comes before all that and is critical to delivering reliable software: quality working relationships and quality interactions. Esther Derby covers pragmatic strategies for building, strengthening, and maintaining working relationships with all stakeholders-managers, customers, team members, and peers. The first step is to build a foundation of trust and respect. Then, we must focus on interests rather than positions and seek joint solutions to problems. We should use the richest communication channel available for our interactions and make a generous interpretation of others’ actions.