Dhiyah

Are usecases effective enough to capture requirements, always?

dhiyahtechnology — Sun, 13 Sep 2009 04:48:55 +0000

I have been a strong supporter of usecase driven methodology for software development. Based on my experiences in the past few years, I am now rethinking that usecase methodology is not always a preferred mode of capturing requirements. I noticed, that managing requirements, eliciting requirements through usecases requires business-technology blend which may not be always at disposal in a project development, where the project is being executed with a limited number of resources. Its imperative that software requirements are bound to change. Managing usecases is more difficult, when the requirements change so fast, and the source of the requirements is unclear about the requirement, and much is left to the developers to decide. The time is luxury and constant pressure to get the system up and running puts additional pressure on developers and managing usecases becomes overhead.

Now, an effective alternative is required, effectively mid path. Coz, usecases are very effective to visualize the system from user’s perspective and provides important flow navigations. Citing the concerns mentioned above, and importance of usecases in software development, I would suggest to consider midpath that provides the important information on how user sees the system, may in a paragraph. Capture the rest of the requirements as features and functionality. I would refer, user interface related ones as features, and server side implementation as functionality.

Address the concerns by cross cutting it.

List the common validations needed for client side validation, such as input validation, length validation and alike.

List the common validations needed for server side validation

List the features

List the functionality and map it to usecase paragraph

Each list has unique id with which you can trace back to requirements.

With this, we can eliminate need to constantly updating and managing the usecases and related requirements and have better handle over development.

Your comments welcome!

Linux facts

dhiyahtechnology — Sun, 30 Aug 2009 17:27:30 +0000

Did you know?

Richard Stallman is the founder of Free Software Foundation (Formerly, GNU – Not Unix)
Linus Torvalds is the father of Linux
No command can be executed unless it gets clearence from shell
Shell analyzes command, modifies, if required before forwarding to kernel
command execution is performed by kernel
Shell is the interpreter
Kernel communicates with hardware and is loaded when system boots
Kernel is responsible for managing system resources, resource allocation, priority assignment, and task execution
Shell is the interface between the user and kernel
Shell has the programming capability
Each user works with his/her shell

Important Keystroke Interrupts:

Ctrl-s: Stop scrolling of screen output
Ctrl-q: Resume scrolling of screen output
Delete: Interrupt command
Ctrl-c: Interrupt command
Ctrl-d: Terminate login session
Ctrl-h: Backspace alternative
Ctrl-u: Kill command line without execution
Ctrl-\: Kill command line without execution
Ctrl-j: Enter alternative
Ctrl-m: Enter alternative
stty sane: Restore terminal to normal status

Installing PCIMCA wireless network card on OpenSUSE using ndiswrapper

dhiyahtechnology — Sun, 30 Aug 2009 13:32:47 +0000

Installing your wireless PCIMCA card in OpenSUSE Linux

First make sure that PCIMCA card is available. For that, at the console, type
/sbin/lspci
This should list your wireless pci card

Make sure that you have installed ndiswrapper utility. OpenSUSE Linux comes with default packages. Open YAST and install the ndiswrapper. Next step is to make sure that whether the driver is already installed.

Open console, type ndiswrapper -l (This would list the installed drivers)
# ndiswrapper -l
Installed driver:
wg511v2 driver installed, hardware present

If the driver is not properly installed, the message would indicate that. In such cases, remove the incorrectly installed driver using

# ndiswrapper -e wg511v2

Now, you may need to installed the driver afresh

# ndiswrapper -i
If you place your windows driver in a folder, say /home/mydriver, then
# ndiswrapper -i /home/mydriver/WG511v2.INF
After running this, check with
# ndiswrapper -l
to see the driver installation is success.

After this step, you may need to activate the device by using
# modprobe ndiswrapper
Finally, restart the network
# rcnetwork restart

Now, you may need to use YAST, goto Network devices selection.
Select Network card, Add your newly installed PCI wireless network card and configure to your network.