Field notes

How the work is actually done

No listicles, no career-change motivation. Each note takes one piece of the job, shows a finished artifact and says what a reviewer would object to.

Field notes, page 2

Non-Functional Requirements Nobody Reads Until Production

What a non-functional requirement is, six of them rewritten from adjective into something that can fail, and who really knows the load figure.

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Eleven Edits That Make a BRD Worth Reading

What a BRD is for, and one fragment of one shown twice: the way it usually arrives, and after eleven edits, with the objection each edit still takes.

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Decision Tables: Business Logic You Can Test

A returns rule that reads well in prose, laid out as a sixteen-row decision table: which combinations the policy settles, and what to do with the rest.

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The Context Diagram That Settles the Scope Argument

The scope argument runs on what stays outside and who inherits it. One box, a ring of entities, one line per exchange, and two tables you can copy.

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From Change Request to Impact Analysis in One Page

A one-line change request and the six fields of an impact analysis, filled in one at a time: what belongs in each field, and how to tell when one is wrong.

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A Business Case a CFO Can Argue With

One page of business case, taken apart line by line: where each number came from, what halving it does to the decision, and who may challenge it.

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As-Is Before To-Be: Modelling the Process That Actually Runs

Two models of the same returns process side by side, and the table of differences between them, with the column most people skip: what each change breaks.

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Acceptance Criteria That Survive a Sprint Review

What an acceptance criterion actually is, six weak ones shown as they arrived and as they went out, and the three objections a reviewer raises first.

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Planned

Next in the queue: The Feasibility Memo That Recommends Not Building It · MoSCoW or WSJF: Prioritising When Everything Is a Must.