- Hardcover: 416 pages
- Publisher: Addison Wesley; 1 edition (23 Jun 1999)
- Language English
- ISBN-10: 0201360462
- ISBN-13: 978-0201360462
- Product Dimensions: 23.9 x 19.3 x 2.7 cm
- Average Customer Review: 4.5 out of 5 stars See all reviews (11 customer reviews)
- Amazon Bestsellers Rank: 99,005 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- See Complete Table of Contents
Mastering the Requirements Process (2nd Edition)
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Product Description
Amazon.co.uk Review
Written for any software analyst or designer, Mastering the Requirements Process provides a powerful and useful guide to defining software requirements that are more complete and lead to overall better software. Written in an engaging style and filled with innovative advice, this book can help anyone who designs software for a living.
The heart of this book is the authors' Volere Requirements Process Model, a step-by-step guide to gathering your requisites. Throughout this book, the authors use this process to explicate a single case study--a system for a municipality that will optimise the de-icing of roadways during snowy weather. Along the way, this book provides a solid guide to identifying and refining requirements, both functional and non-functional (such as performance and ease-of-use).
There are many excellent ideas in the book, including the notion of "fitness" for your requirements, which can be later used to track whether software is successful. The book also wisely separates technology from requirements so that analysts can concentrate on understanding and modelling business problems instead of moving right away to the nuts-and-bolts of implementation. Even if you don't adopt the Volere model, any software designer can benefit from the concepts of trawling (a metaphor for the requirements gathering process), quality gateways (in which tentative requirements are evaluated for inclusion in a project) and the wise use of patterns to help simplify the process.
Anchored by numerous examples (including many samples of successful requirements), the book provides an appealing mix of new ideas along with a remarkably clear presentation. In short, Mastering the Requirements Process provides useful advice that can make the project specification building phase of the software process easier and more robust. It provides the first steps for improving overall software quality for your organisation. --Richard Dragan, amazon.com
Topics covered: Volere Requirements Process Model, project blast-off, determining requirements, user and stakeholders, project constraints, requirements constraints, use cases, business events, adjacent systems, innovation, trawling for requirements: apprenticing, interviews and videotape, functional and non-functional requirements, fit criteria, quality gateways, traceability, prototyping and scenarios, low and high-fidelity prototypes, patterns and requirements reuse, improving the requirements gathering process.
Product Description
Delivering the software that your customer really wants.
"Mastering the Requirements Process and the Volere specification template are real breakthroughs. They introduce the beginnings of science to a domain which had, up till now, been ruled by craft." - Tom DeMarco
It is widely recognized that incorrect requirements account for up to 60% of errors in software products, and yet the majority of software development organizations do not have a formal requirements process.
Many organizations appear willing to spend huge amounts on fixing and altering badly-specified software, but seem unwilling to invest a much smaller amount to get the requirements right in the first place.
This is a book for those who want to get the right requirements.
Mastering the Requirements Process sets out an industry-tested process for gathering and verifying requirements. It provides the techniques and insights for discovering precisely what the customer wants and needs.
"Mastering the Requirements Process shows, step by step, template by template, example by example, one well-tested way to assemble a complete, comprehensive requirements process." - Jerry Weinberg
The specification template in this book provides the basis for your own requirements specifications. It guides you to the correct specification content as each part of the process reveals different aspects of the products functionality and properties.
This book shows you how to make the requirement measurable and testable. By providing a measurement - a fit criterion - for each requirement, the requirements analyst can describe precisely what the customer wants, the designer can construct a product that exactly matches the requirement, and the tester can determine whether or not the final solution satisfies the requirement.
"The Robertsons' concept of fit criteria is -- all by itself -- worth the investment of your time to read the whole book. Fit criteria and the allied discipline of quality gateways enable you to build requirement sets that are measurable, provably correct and testibly complete." - Tom DeMarco
"Mastering the Requirements Process and the Volere specification template are real breakthroughs. They introduce the beginnings of science to a domain which had, up till now, been ruled by craft." - Tom DeMarco
It is widely recognized that incorrect requirements account for up to 60% of errors in software products, and yet the majority of software development organizations do not have a formal requirements process.
Many organizations appear willing to spend huge amounts on fixing and altering badly-specified software, but seem unwilling to invest a much smaller amount to get the requirements right in the first place.
This is a book for those who want to get the right requirements.
Mastering the Requirements Process sets out an industry-tested process for gathering and verifying requirements. It provides the techniques and insights for discovering precisely what the customer wants and needs.
"Mastering the Requirements Process shows, step by step, template by template, example by example, one well-tested way to assemble a complete, comprehensive requirements process." - Jerry Weinberg
The specification template in this book provides the basis for your own requirements specifications. It guides you to the correct specification content as each part of the process reveals different aspects of the products functionality and properties.
This book shows you how to make the requirement measurable and testable. By providing a measurement - a fit criterion - for each requirement, the requirements analyst can describe precisely what the customer wants, the designer can construct a product that exactly matches the requirement, and the tester can determine whether or not the final solution satisfies the requirement.
"The Robertsons' concept of fit criteria is -- all by itself -- worth the investment of your time to read the whole book. Fit criteria and the allied discipline of quality gateways enable you to build requirement sets that are measurable, provably correct and testibly complete." - Tom DeMarco
Inside This Book
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First Sentence
The most useful products are those where the developers have understood what the product is intended to accomplish for its users and how it must accomplish that purpose. Read the first page Browse Sample Pages
Front Cover | Copyright | Table of Contents | Excerpt | Index | Back Cover
The most useful products are those where the developers have understood what the product is intended to accomplish for its users and how it must accomplish that purpose. Read the first page Browse Sample Pages
Front Cover | Copyright | Table of Contents | Excerpt | Index | Back Cover
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
7 of 7 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
IThis is very very good stuff,
By
This review is from: Mastering the Requirements Process (Hardcover)
This is just a gem. If you've never read anything else about requirements, start here, and when you have widened your reading,you'll still find yourself stuffing it into your bag to re-read a half-remembered chapter on the train, months or years later. Of all the requirements books this is the one that I come back to for basic common sense. It's really about software challenges, but you can extrapolate the techniques to other fields; I just wish they'd write some more stuff like this for goofball systems engineers trying to mix up software, hardware, processes and people in complex supply chains. Then I'd be in systems heaven! Their other book is great too. (They should pay me for this copy)
21 of 23 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
This gives the vital "how",
By hholliday@broner.co.uk (Rickmansworth, UK) - See all my reviews
This review is from: Mastering the Requirements Process (Hardcover)
This book emphasises the rigour, evolutionary nature and structure of requirements. For those in a rush, the book has a very brief and useful summary at the end of each chapter. The Requirements Specification Template is at the heart/brain of this book. The template includes the Requirements Shell, which is filled-in for each individual requirement. The book explains the processes involved in producing the template. Requirements are structured in a very holistic manner and they have the concept of "potential requirements"; requirements are not real until they have passed through the Quality Gateway. On the downside, the book seems rather lengthy with much repetition but is worth its weight in gold for the Appendices: A "A Volere Requirements Process Model", B "Volere Requirements Specification Template". Also, the practical experience and humour of the authors shine through. Note: "Volere" is the Italian word for "to wish" or "to want".
3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
An excellent Requirements Book,
By
This review is from: Mastering the Requirements Process (Hardcover)
This is probably the best book that I have read on the broad subject of Requirements Process. Thankfully it is not another book pushing a limited view of Requirements .. not all project types respond well to pure Agile and not all project types need Waterfall. Instead it presents the core principles of Requirements Process and shows how to weave a thread through whatever process, (Agile, Waterfall, Agifall, Watergile) that you choose. This is a professional approach and allows you to select the most appropriate tools and techniques.Very specifically, the requirements process is presented from the very start, with the Business Process, which is then analysed down into automated parts, the Use Cases, and the manual processes. The Use Cases then become the source of the testable requirements. The process described fits quite easily with PRINCE and answers many questions left open in other tomes on this subject. Given that we know that inadequate requirements are a source of much error and rework it is a good idea that all IT professionals have a rather complete picture of how requirements should be captured, managed and implemented. This book is strongly recommended as a thorough view of the subject. It does present requirements process from the point of view of the author's process, "Volere", but that should not distract as it is an evolved and thorough process. It allows the authors to be specific in their provision of templates for requirements, and to provide detaield implementation details. Their associated website also has many useful whitepapers and templates. The book addresses Requirements Process along three parallel paths, the "Rabbits", fast agile types of project, the "Horse", more formal enterprise projects, and naturally, the Elephant ... the heavyweight project. Each has its requirements needs addressed throughout the book. There is just one story about requirements.. the principles, and they can be mapped onto whatever type of project. This book shows how to do that and is strongly recommend.
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