Posted by Robert Merrill on July 2, 2009 under Agile Software Development, Business Analysis, Software Requirements | 
From Use Cases to User Stories, I’ve always struggled with how to treat the non-functional requirements. I haven’t tried it yet, but this article by Ryan Shriver on Qualities and User Stories contains something that looks like it just might work:
Name: A unique name for the quality
Scale: “What” you’ll measure (aka the units of measure, such as seconds)
Meter: “How” you’ll measure (aka the device you’ll use to obtain measurements)
Target: The level of performance you’re aiming to achieve (how good it can be)
Constraint: The level of performance you’re trying to avoid (how bad it can be)
Benchmark: Your current level of performance.
Ryan provided the following example for a navigation system:
Name: Navigation Start Up Time
Scale: Elapsed seconds from when Driver clicks Navigation icon until Navigation Main Menu appears (assumes satellite connection is present and working)
Meter: Stopwatch timed from user interface
Target: < 20 seconds <- performance of competing product
Fail: > 50 seconds
Benchmark [Build 1703; Oct 7; First start-up; Standard Environment]: 50 seconds
There was an interesting discussion between Ryan Shriver and Steven Gordon on the Agile Project Management Yahoo! Group about this technique, and whether the NFRs shouldn’t just be doneness criteria on all of the relevant user stories. Ryan’s point is that making them separate keeps them more visible.
Either way, at least now I have a structured way to write them down to go with the User Story Template for Event-Driven Users.
Posted by Robert Merrill on June 30, 2009 under Tech Tips |
I use Google Analytics. I don’t get a lot of traffic, so I like to exclude my own visits to my site from the reports. I use the Google Analyticator plug-in. Its Settings allow you to exclude traffic from the wp-admin pages, and also exclude all traffic from anyone logged in as an Administrator.
But I don’t routinely blog and moderate as an Administrator; I use an account with Editor privileges (my security sensibilities showing through I guess). Before moving to WordPress, I had a special page that set a cookie, and a Google Analytics filter to ignore that traffic. I didn’t want to keep using that mechanism, because I don’t like to spread responsibilities around in software if I can help it. Analyticator looks like it wants to handle traffic filtering, so I don’t want to fight it.
Fortunately, as an Administrator you can manage the Settings for each Plug-In. Analyticator’s has a form field that lets you set the “user level” at which Analyticator disables Google Analytics. The default cutoff level is 8, and it also tells you that as an Administrator, you are a 10. This wasn’t as helpful as it first seemed, because as an Editor, I couldn’t see the Analyticator Settings to see my current level, so I couldn’t determine the new cut-off value to set.
But a quick look in the WordPress Codex taught me about Roles, Capabilities, and associated levels (levels being a legacy mechanism).
So, to exclude yourself (and everyone else in a given WordPress role) from your Google Analytics, log in as an Administrator and,
| To Exclude Traffic from |
Set Analyticator Cutoff Level To |
| Administrator |
8 or more |
| Editor and above |
3 or more |
| Author and above |
2 or more |
| Contributor and above |
1 or more |
Save your settings and log out. Then log in as your usual blogger/moderator user and tell WordPress to remember you.
Your visits to your own site will no longer inflate your Google Analytics reports.
If you delete all your cookies, you’ll need to log back in as your blogger/moderator user or Analyticator will think you’re an anonymous guest and log your traffic again.
Posted by admin on June 27, 2009 under Uncategorized |
Pretty painless, really. Total effort, including downloading and backing up the old production files and database, was about 3 h.
One “gotcha,” though. Even though I hadn’t changed anything about my permalinks, I still had to go into admin > Settings > Permalinks and re-save my permalink definition to get them to work. Otherwise there were 404s all over the place. The right radio button was already checked; I just needed to do a Save Settings again.