Mastering the Requirements Process: Amazon.co.uk: Suzanne Robertson, James C. Robertson: Books

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. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

Product Description

"If the purpose is to create one of the best books on requirements yet written, the authors have succeeded."

—Capers Jones

It is widely recognized that incorrect requirements account for up to 60 percent 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 poorly specified software, but seem unwilling to invest a much smaller amount to get the requirements right in the first place.

Mastering the Requirements Process, Second Edition, sets out an industry-proven process for gathering and verifying requirements with an eye toward today's agile development environments. In this total update of the bestselling guide, the authors show how to discover precisely what the customer wants and needs while doing the minimum requirements work according to the project's level of agility.

Features include

The Volere requirements process—completely specified, and revised for compatibility with agile environments

A specification template that can be used as the basis for your own requirements specifications

New agility ratings that help you funnel your efforts into only the requirements work needed for your particular development environment and project

How to make requirements testable using fit criteria

Iterative requirements gathering leading to faster delivery to the client

Checklists to help identify stakeholders, users, nonfunctional requirements, and more

Details on gathering and implementing requirements for iterative releases

An expanded project sociology section for help with identifying and communicating with stakeholders

Strategies for exploiting use cases to determine the best product to build

Methods for reusing requirements and requirements patterns

Examples showing how the techniques and templates are applied in real-world situations

See all Product Description

Customer Reviews

3 star

1 star

4.5 out of 5 stars

Write a customer review

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

7 of 7 people found the following review helpful

IThis is very very good stuff 29 Jan 2007

By C. T. Wood

Format: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)

Comment |

Was this review helpful to you?

Yes

21 of 23 people found the following review helpful

This gives the vital "how" 3 Feb 2000

By hholliday@broner.co.uk

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".

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful

An excellent Requirements Book 28 July 2009

By G. M. Brooke

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.