Why the blog?

To record development problems and hopefully subsequent solutions when working on an ongoing Java project.

When I started on this project, it was already 5 years old. I thought it would be useful see how introducing some XP techniques might help reduce some unwanted artifacts

A test-driven re-write would be my preference, but as is so typical, this has been ruled out as too much work.

So, hopefully continuous gradual change in the right direction will help.

Thursday, June 26, 2008

Too many tools
A lead BA let us know the new 'requirements gathering' process today, basically a business workflow process. Regardless of what this was, the following is true (in my case).

Development work must be prioritised to deliver the most important thing for the business. Development work is triggered from
1. User comes up with a new requirement that will make their life easier
2. BA comes up with a new requirement from analysis that will improve efficiency/cost
3. A bug is found in production that needs fixing
4. A bug is found in testing process that needs fixing.

Various people need to be aware of requirements and track them to completion.
I.e. Users, BAs, project managers, developers, testers etc.

What was madness was the solution used a different tool to log each of the aforementioned items. A helpdesk tool, a user idea request tool, a testing tool and a separate requirements gathering tool.
All the actual development would then be done against another tool e.g. Bugzilla type thing linked to source control.
Any hope of tracking anything without double or triple keying is going to be tricky.
I haven't used it myself but I think JIRA would be worth a go to do the lot.
I have used TRAC and that was ok after some customization

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