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Facilitating the Spread of Knowledge and Innovation in Professional Software Development

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Conversation Patterns for Software Professionals

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Cooperation between the business and IT is governed by two harmful stereotypes: IT claims that in the business they do not know what they want, while the business is convinced that IT does not think with a business mindset. Sometimes, we entrench ourselves in these positions to such an extent that we are unable to find a thread of understanding, which is necessary to develop valuable software.

This book includes a set of cut-and-dried techniques for improving your cooperation with the business. The main goal of this publication is to give you two key skills: discovering the business needs and managing the conversation in a way that will enable you to collect precise and useful information.

First and foremost, I promote the first point of the Agile Manifesto: “Individuals and interactions over processes and tools.” If you tend to think that your clients do not know what they want, this book is exactly for you.

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Table of contents

  • Between the business and IT  
  • What does it mean to “think in a business way”?  
  • The art of asking questions  
  • What is a business need?  
  • Discovering business needs  
  • Conversation structure   
  • Questions that hit the nail on the head   
  • How to convince your client to back your ideas  
  • Is there a kind of chemistry between us?  
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