Agile Software Requirements: Lean Requirements Practices for Teams, Programs, and the Enterprise

Chapter 13. Vision, Features, and Roadmap

The best way to predict the future is to invent it.

—Alan Kay, American computer scientist

In this chapter, we’ll introduce three different but closely related topics—the Vision, features, and the Roadmap. First, we’ll describe how the Vision is used to continuously communicate the strategic intent of the program, and we’ll describe a number of approaches for communicating and documenting this critical information. Then, as the primary content of the Vision is a set of features, we’ll describe how to formulate, estimate, and prioritize features to deliver the maximum value to our users. Lastly, we’ll discuss the product Roadmap, which is a tool we’ll use to communicate how we see the future of the ...