Most defects in delivered software originate in insufficient or inaccurate requirements. To reduce defects, many teams write use cases to define user requirements. Certainly, use cases are useful for defining user requirements, organizing system architecture, designing test cases, and partitioning requirements into releases. However, teams that rely mainly on use cases are missing a critical software development component: business rules. Business rules are at the heart of functional requirements, capturing the knowledge behind every structure and process of an organization. This presentation will explore why teams need to define business rules and how they relate to use cases and other analysis models. Attendees will learn approaches for eliciting business rules and techniques for documenting, verifying, and validating them.

SPEAKER: Ellen Gottesdiener, Principal Consultant, EBG Consulting, Inc.

Ellen Gottesdiener, Principal Consultant, EBG Consulting, helps teams collaboratively explore requirements, shape their development processes, and plan their work. Her latest book is The Software Requirements Memory Jogger: A Pocket Guide to Help Software and Business Teams Develop and Manage Requirements. Ellen’s experiences as an agile requirements facilitator are articulated in her book Requirements by Collaboration: Workshops for Defining Needs (Addison-Wesley, 2002).

Ellen has extensive experience working with business and software teams to successfully start up projects, define product requirements, and improve teamwork. Her industry career includes being a developer, analyst, trainer, project manager, and process leader. She presents seminars on requirements, facilitated workshops, retrospectives, and software inspections and peer reviews. She is a conference speaker and advisor for the Software Development conferences and the stickyminds.com Web site. She has authored numerous papers on software requirements, methods, and modeling, and she is a Certified Professional Facilitator (CPF).

Presentation Link