Yesterday James Shore completed his multi-part guide to agile requirements management, or collaboration as he prefers to call it. These articles are well worth studying and adopting.

I particularly like Jim’s focus on Eric Evans’ UbiquitousLanguage pattern as driving the process. I believe that in our industry’s collective rush to eliminate muda and become extreme many teams have made a huge mistake and thrown the domain model out with the bath-water. Jim shows how the language of the domain can become the key to successful collaboration between developers and stakeholders.

I also like Jim’s over-arching describe-demonstrate-develop process – particularly the comment that the developers shouldn’t run the Fit tests while doing the develop part. As we saw at the dojo in Rotterdam, it can be too easy to fall into the trap of using customer tests for a kind of TDD, at which point coverage and design both go missing.

Jim’s article yesterday now brings all of these pieces – and more – together in a coherent whole.