The normal requirements process for a company is for the business or product folks to create a requirements document (BRD, PRD, etc) and then that is translated via business analysts and user experience into Use Cases, Wireframes, or some other mechanism that can be handed off to the developers. The engineering team then divides those tasks up, estimates them, QA resources are marshalled to match it, and bang off they go.
One of the issues with this process is the translation from the business requirements, to the engineering implementation. Expectations by the business don't always match the implementation presented by the engineers. Part of the reason is that the language used by the business and product developers is different to the language of the engineers. Agile tries to mitigate this confusion by having a business member in the daily scrum do developers can get immediate feedback.
Behavior Driven Development tries to solve this problem by making the business, product, engineering and quality assurance
all speak the same 'testable' language.
BDD relies on the use of a very specific (and small) vocabulary to minimise miscommunication and to ensure that everyone - the business, developers, testers, analysts and managers - are not only on the same page but using the same words.
This is actually quite a big buy in. Changing the vocabulary and specification process of a company, company wide as this suggests, takes a large change in how things are done. The BDD folks argue that this is not a new process just a different way of doing the same thing, nothing has really changed.
Talking as an Australian who had his cultural baggage kicked from under when moving to the US before I realized cultures were largely different mechanisms to do the same things, cultural changes like the vocabulary of specifications are a large shift.
That being said, it would be wonderful if the language of all the business units that go toward making software speak the same vocabulary and a testable vocabulary at that, would be wonderful. I can see its immediate advantages.
Phoenix Eats Out is the restaurant review site for
Phoenix,
Scottsdale and
Old Town Scottsdale which lists the modernist and contemporary restaurants, taverns and bars in the greater Phoenix area.
This is the list of the most popular restaurants pages from phoenixeatsout.com that have been viewed the most;
My personal favourite restaurants in Phoenix are
AZ88,
Postinos,
Bomberos with
Grazie,
Humble Pie,
Orange Table,
The Vig,
Fez and others coming close behind. View the complete list with the photo-journalistic style images on
phoenixeatsout.com
Arizona is an outdoor state and has lots of hiking in the city and around the state. Phoenix is unusual for most cities in having several large mountains in the center of the city with great hiking. Anyone who comes to Phoenix has to do the
Echo Canyon trail on Camelback and the
Summit Hike on Squaw Peak or Piesta Peak. The views of the city, suburbs and surrounding mountains are wonderful from Camelback and Piesta Peak.
For more experienced hikers there is the McDowell Mountains in North Scottsdale that has several difficult and strenuous hikes in
Tom's Thumb and
Bell Pass. Alternatively, you can hike the highest mountain in Arizona. At 12,600 feet
Humphrey's Peak is a long and difficult hike.
Between 2004 and 2009 this site,
southsearepublic.org, was a constitutional blog based on scoop which focused on Australian and global constitutional issues.
One of the strongest aspects of it was the development of constitutions by those involved in the blog. These constitutions are the outcome:
The constitutions were built using principles from Montesquieu's separation of powers, the enlightnment's universal political rights and the ancient Athenian technology of sortition and choice by lot.
South Sea Republic started in 2004 as an Australian constitutional blog in 2004 based on scoop software. It was an immigrative outgrowth of Kuro5hin. The archives for each year since then;
The articles are ordered by views.
I am an Australian living in the United States as a permanent resident.
I am a software developer by trade and mostly work in Java and jump between middleware and front end.
I originally worked in the New York area of the United States in telecommunications before moving to Washington DC and
working in a mix of telecommunications, energy and ITS. I started my own software company before heading out to
Arizona and working with Shutterfly. Since then I have joined a startup in the Phoenix area and am thoroughly enjoying myself.
I do a lot of photography which I post on this website, but also on flickr. I have a photo-journalistic website which lists
the modernist and contemporary restaurants in phoenix. I have a site on the
Australian Flying Corps [AFC] which has been around since the 1990s and which I unfortunately
lost the .org URL to during a life event; however, it is under the
www.australianflyingcorps.com URL now.
The AFC website has gone through several iterations since the 90s and the two most recent are
Australian Flying Corps Archives(2004-2002) and
Australian Flying Corps Archives(2002-1999) which are good places to start.
