XPTools

Step 1: Write the story

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Let's start with the Extreme Programming (XP) way to analyze requirements. In XP projects, customer requirements are written down in so-called stories using the customers vocabulary to describe what should be achieved.
Feel free to map the steps of this tutorial on another software development methodology like RUP (the stories would be part of the inception phase) or Peter Coad's Feature-driven development (FDD). Since testing is a very important part of XP, I have chosen it for the tutorial and I recommend it for small teams with highly-skilled developers.

The following initial story, written by a customer who is an application developer, will lead us into the tutorial project:

I want the application I develop to understand URLs. As it's programmer I want to get the parts of an URL piece by piece and use them without parsing the URL myself.

During an interview, the customer tells us that he wants URLs broken down conforming to Internet Standards. That means, he does not need to support non-standard URLs like javascript: or www.extreme-java.de like Netscape Navigator does.

Based on this story, the next step analyses the requirements in the story and breaks them down into tasks.