To learn more concrete and practical about software requirements management (RM), I searched the Web to find some requirements management tools. In the beginning, I reached this website: Requirement Management Tools, which provides a list of 36 requirement management tools. By my heuristic guessing, I selected some tools to visit and finally found the following RM tool very good and professional. I think it is sufficiently good for learning purpose.

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Introduction to Software Requirements (Catherine Connor)

This is a good presentation that introduces Software Requirement. The author is with the Rational Software of IBM Software Group and a worldwide technical marketing and requirements specialist. I would recommend this to Software Engineering students. It is also good for review purpose.

Content moves beyond websites. Interaction is no longer just straight HTML. Users control how data is categorized and manipulated. RSS is used as an Interface. These are the characteristics of the current trend in the Web development. What I am excited about is, with the high popularity of RSS, the increasing availability of Application Programming Interfaces (APIs), and the good applications of Folksonomies and Social Networking, it is possible to create useful web applications very fast and relatively inexpensively.

Example 1: Marumushi Newsmap. “It reads the headlines from Google News and displays topics to explore patterns in how stories are emphasized in the media.” (more…)

Paul Graham recently gave a keynote speech on Oscon 2005 (O’Reilly Open Source Convention - August 1-5, 2005 - Portland, Oregon). I listened to his talk via IT Conversations. Here is the link: Paul Graham - An OSCON 2005 Keynote.

Graham pointed out and discussed the three big lessons that business can learn from open source and blogging.
(1) People work harder on stuff they like.
(2) The standard office environment is very unproductive.
(3) Bottom-up often works better than top-down.

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I want to find a Wordpress plugin that can fetch a number of RSS feeds, mix them together, and output the contents in my Wordpress blog in time order. I have looked at 5 Wordpress plugins for this objective. The following are my initial findings.

RSS-Import (WordPress Plugin) - Import RSS-newsfeeds in your site. I think it is a simple and good plugin. However, it cannot do with multiple RSS feeds at a time. You use it by putting a PHP code like RSSImport(5, “http://www.stevenchoy.com/feed/”, false, false) somewhere in your wordpress template file. If you want to embed a feed content into a page or a post, you need to install another Wordpress plugin such as PHP Exec (need PHP version 4.3.0 or later) that allows running of PHP code in posts or pages. (more…)

Time magazine asked Tim O’Reilly, publisher and technology advocate, about his views on what innovation will most alter how we live in the next few years. O’Reilly replied that it is collective intelligence.

I think we’re at the first stages of something that will be profoundly different from anything we have seen before, in terms of the ability of connected computers to deliver results. We’re entering an era in which software learns from its users and all of the users are connected.

I read this from an article of TIME Magazine dated October 16, 2005. This article assembled some of the smartest people including O’Reilly to identify the trends that are most likely to affect our future. I like the above quote and it is in connection with my thoughts about the Web.