For the midterm you can use a group cheat sheet, and it can be 20 pages front and back
Lectures
How does Alan define competitive engineering? Can you state the rationale behind defining it in this manner? How does Paul O'Shaughnessy view it (or rather not view it)?
Why does Alan say that excellent customer service can rescue a poor product?
What does Alan mean about "the customer isn't always right?" (I hope you paid close attention to his lecture)
What's the role of a Business and Systems Analyst? Why are they so essential in today's software development teams?
Is marketing merely about seducing the customer to buy what he or she doesn't really need? What kind of tasks / roles could they play in your dev teams.
Why is your relationship with your customer an inseparable part of your software product?
Can you define the elements of a Prospectus? What's the difference between needs versus features? Why is that such an important distinction?
Paul O' Shaughnessy
TBA
On Teams
Why do you suppose that medium innovation projects did not yield as high an ROI as incremental and radical innovation projects? What lessons does that have for developing our software projects?
How do we mitigate the time penalties associated with project complexity? With a completely new type of project (to the team)?
What does Alan see as essential ingredients for successful software project teams?
Out of the Box Requirements Gathering & Product Development
What is a critical success factor? How is this reflected throughout your project? (hint: "a handful is a handful")
What is benchmarking? Can you describe the main types of benchmarking? Why do we attempt to measure performance? Why can't we go on just our gut feelings? What is the real goal of benchmarking?
Can you define and describe a set of out-of-the box benchmarking methods? What's an image customer? What is a lead user? What is an image team member? How can you use these to enhance product development?
What is a mini-mortem? How and when would I conduct a mini-mortem?
Software Development and Marketing Tips
What's the difference betweeen a "bug hunt" versus a design review? Why does Alan say that: "on one hand we delay freezing the design requirements, and on the other hand, we hurry up during the early development phases?"
What is a reframe? What's the purpose of the reframe?
What is meta-design? What's the research say about meta-design?
What is an early crises? How would I execute an early crises? What's the purpose or function of an early crises?
What is the iterative customer? How would I utilize that technique in planning my customer meetings?
What is role induction? What methods are associated with it? What's the goal of role induction? From where did it originate?
Why present the customer with storyboards, drawings, prototypes, or scenarios? What is joint applications development?
How do you deal with a customer that waffles or is oppositional? (hint: extreme choice method)
What is a lead user and how can I use this lead user to help me develop better software?
Software Project Management Tips
What does Alan mean when he says "feature creep"? What does he (surprisingly) say is a leading cause of feature creep?
What is good enough reengineering? How does it relate to customer design requirements gathering? What's the difference between the BlueSky approach to gathering design priorities from your customer versus a Realistic approach to your customer?
What are some software process reengineering tips? How does Alan take a cynical look at software process management (hint: look at the slides surrounding "imagine a world without software"...it also relates to good enough reengineering).
With respect to software project size and scope, why does Alan says that "The bigger they are, the harder they fall"?
What are the marks of a software project in trouble? How can even a non-software project manager sense when the actual coding is in trouble?
In compressed time schedules, do we devote a greater % of time to coding? Or do we devote a greater % of time to requirements gathering?
Empathic Design
Why doesn't Alan think that simply interviewing the customer isn't enough? (hint: recall the office space video)
Observation and Process Mapping
Why is process mapping so important? What pisses Alan off about the usual way IT documentation and diagrams are constructed?
What's the value in having an outsider view a company? How does one deal with information overload? Why be a participant observer? How does a team be efficient with information gathering with an unusual set of customers?
Tom Vu's Visit
What was Tom's "lesson one"? What does he believe with respect to the nature of requirements that are expressed by the customer?
What do you need to get from the client to delight and win?
How does Tom view with feature creep? How does Tom enact project estimation in light of feature creep? Provide a comprehensive answer.
For what reasons do "surprises" occur with the client? What recommendations does Tom have for eliminating these problems?