Professional Application Lifecycle Management with Visual Studio 2012

Chapter 9

Capturing Stakeholder Feedback

What's in this chapter?

• Discovering how the development team can request feedback from stakeholders on specific features or requirements
• Learning how project stakeholders can use the Microsoft Feedback Client to provide rich feedback about your software

So far in this section you have learned about the importance of engaging with your software development project's stakeholders to ensure that you have a clear understanding of what your stakeholders want you to build before you start implementing it. But regardless of how much time you spend up front during this requirements elicitation phase, the first iteration of software you create is rarely going to meet all of their expectations.

There are a variety of reasons for this. Technical challenges might get in the way of the originally planned implementation; business requirements may evolve from the time when you first capture them to the time that you implement the first working code; the opinions of users can be fickle, and may even be influenced by seeing the software in action for the first time; you may not have truly understood what your stakeholders were asking for when you were capturing their requirements; or you may not have had time to implement all the requirements in the initial release.

These possibilities will be anticipated by any Agile software development team who embraces the fact that software development is something of an art form, requiring iterative cycles of requirements ...