Team Skill 5 led us through some useful techniques for collecting, organizing, and documenting the requirements for your development project. We also considered various techniques for specifying the needs of the project, nothing that the single most important success factor is to collect all of the requirements for the project and to help the stakeholders understand and agree on the requirements.

In this Team Skill, we'll focus on moving from the definition of a solution system to finally building a system that meets stakeholder needs. This next step is the most difficult to date. To help you accomplish this, in the next few chapters we will examine a method to move from the specifications (via use cases) to designing and implementing the system.

Many projects quickly evolve into a flurry of development activities with lots of favorable progress being made. However, at the end of the day, it turned out that the mighty dust cloud of development obscured the fact that the client did not get the system they wanted. In this Team Skill, we also want to look beyond the development activities and ask, "How do you know you are building the right system?"

Two strong determinants that help you answer that question are verification and validation. We will look more closely at how these two techniques can be integrated into your implementation activities so as to sharpen your development focus onto those things that really matter to the project.

And of course, no development is immune to changes in the project as time passes. Accordingly, this Team Skill will investigate the nature of change and will discuss ways of embracing change and controlling it so that your project does not run out of control.