This is an article by Steve Calde who will be presenting at the July 2008 Catalyze webcast.

"Personas and other user-modeling techniques are often solely discussed as tools for product definition and design, but they are useful tools in other arenas, as well. Technical writers responsible for creating user documentation can benefit greatly from a well-defined persona set, too.

Using personas to guide your user-documentation creation-process helps you:

• Determine the primary and secondary audiences for your documents
• Prioritize technical writing tasks by giving you a tool for identifying which aspects of the product are most important to your readers
• Write documentation in a way that helps your users achieve their goals, instead of simply cataloguing all of the product's features."

Ten Tips for Driving Better Project Outcomes
This is the recording of the June 12, 2008 Catalyze Webcast recording with Carey Schwaber from Forrester.

"It’s no secret that in the battle to bring effective business software to market on time and on budget, business analysts are on the front lines.   What can business analysts do to improve requirements definition practices and make a difference in project outcomes?  Join us as Forrester Senior Analyst, Carey Schwaber, shares a set of 10 practical tips that you can immediately put into action in your organization.  The Webcast was sponsored by iRise."

The slides are available here.

From CIO.com and Esther Schindler...

"A handful of über-programmers are immediately recognizable to most software developers, often on a first-name basis—the way that other communities might recognize "Britney" or "Oprah" without further explanation. These individuals shape the way programmers design and build applications, by identifying process improvements or designing life-changing tools.  One unquestioned person on that list is Grady Booch. His primary influence on object-oriented programming was as an original developer of the Unified Modeling Language (UML)."

1. The fundamentals never go out of style
2. You need a regular rhythm of releases
3. Focus upon growing executable architectures
4. Create social structures that encourage innovation while still preserving predictability
5. Have fun!

Read the entire article for all of the details and links.

Video tutorial of a stakeholder interest analysis from Com Kaner, professor of computer science from Florida Institute of Technology.

"An example of a stakeholder interest analysis." [Kaner & Bach's Black Box Software Testing Course (BBST Public Course), hosted at the Satisfice Moodle server, www.satisfice.com/moodle, BBST Public Course, enrollment key = "whitebox".] Developed for an ethics course that Keith Miller and I taught at University of Illinois, this illustrates the same type of stakeholder analysis that we do when evaluating requirements for test documentation, test automation, scenarios, etc"

Here is a blog post that "suggests a minimal way to gather requirements, one that produces a (minimum) requirements document in an iterative and agile manner.

Nick Malik blogs for the Inside Architecture blog on MSDN.