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Discovering Requirements: How to Specify Products and Services (Paperback)

by Ian Alexander (Author), Ljerka BeusDukic (Author)
5.0 out of 5 stars See all reviews (5 customer reviews)
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Product details

  • Paperback: 476 pages
  • Publisher: John Wiley & Sons (27 Feb 2009)
  • Language English
  • ISBN-10: 0470712406
  • ISBN-13: 978-0470712405
  • Product Dimensions: 23.2 x 18.8 x 2.8 cm
  • Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars See all reviews (5 customer reviews)
  • Amazon.co.uk Sales Rank: 230,292 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

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Product Description

Product Description

Essential reading before practitioners tackle a substantial requirements project

  • Covering everything practitioners need to know to create good requirements, this book uses worked examples in order to show readers how to build an understanding of various problems that may arise
  • Includes difficult scenarios in each chapter, with carefully checked hints
  • Offering an up–to–date and fresh approach, the material uses a set of simple, robust, and effective cognitive tools for building requirements to explain the right questions to ask while working on a project
  • Author duo shares detailed answers to questions such as what needs to be achieved, what is involved, what does the customer want, what could go wrong, and how can a common goal be accomplished

Ian Alexander consults and trains on requirements. He is the coauthor of several books, including Writing Better Requirements (ISBN tk) and Scenarios, Stories, Use Cases (ISBN tk), and has published many technical papers and popular articles, including regular contributions to the IEEE Software.

Ljerka Beus–Dukic is a lecturer in software engineering and has taught requirements engineering for a number of years. She is the author of numerous technical papers and publications.



From the Back Cover
“This book is not only of practical value. It’s also a lot of fun to read.” Michael Jackson, The Open University.

Do you need to know how to create good requirements?

Discovering Requirements offers a set of simple, robust, and effective cognitive tools for building requirements. Using worked examples throughout the text, it shows you how to develop an understanding of any problem, leading to questions such as:

  • What are you trying to achieve?

  • Who is involved, and how?

  • What do those people want? Do they agree?

  • How do you envisage this working?

  • What could go wrong?

  • Why are you making these decisions? What are you assuming?

    The established author team of Ian Alexander and Ljerka Beus–Dukic answer these and related questions, using a set of complementary techniques, including stakeholder analysis, goal modelling, context modelling, storytelling and scenario modelling, identifying risks and threats, describing rationales, defining terms in a project dictionary, and prioritizing.

    This easy to read guide is full of carefully–checked tips and tricks. Illustrated with worked examples, checklists, summaries, keywords and exercises, this book will encourage you to move closer to the real problems you’re trying to solve. Guest boxes from other experts give you additional hints for your projects.

    Invaluable for anyone specifying requirements including IT practitioners, engineers, developers, business analysts, test engineers, configuration managers, quality engineers and project managers.
    A practical sourcebook for lecturers as well as students studying software engineering who want to learn about requirements work in industry.

    Once you’ve read this book you will be ready to create good requirements!

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    Customer Reviews

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    3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
    5.0 out of 5 stars Review of Discovering Requirements, 22 Mar 2009
    By Suzanne Robertson - See all my reviews
    (REAL NAME)   
    Review of Discovering Requirements, by Ian Alexander and Ljerka Beus-Dukic, John Wiley, 2009.

    This book provides valuable and accessible techniques for anyone who is involved in the process of eliciting requirements. The authors have avoided organising the book in a procedural way; instead they have structured it using the intersection of nine "requirements elements" and five "discovery contexts". Each chapter focuses on how to gather more information about one specific requirements element within each of the discovery contexts.

    Chapter 6 for example is about a requirements element called "Qualities and Constraints". Here the chapter focuses on techniques for discovering the non-functional requirements (qualities) and compliance issues (constraints) in a variety of discovery contexts. Contexts in this case can mean the individual stakeholders, relevant groups and so on. The strength of this organisation is the freedom it gives the reader to move around within the book (possibly a new non-functional requirements type) while at the same time providing the reader with an overall connective framework.

    The combination of sociological, philosophical and technological themes provides a much needed emphasis that requirements are not just about software solutions. References to Peter Checkland's work, among others, reminds readers that "system" does not necessarily mean "computer system" and that effective requirements discovery means looking at the wider world.

    I am pleased to see techniques for goal modelling and structuring are covered in sufficient detail to enable practitioners unfamiliar with the notation to put it to good use.
    Priorities is another requirements element for which the authors provide a number of alternative thinking approaches. I like the idea of thinking about "input priorities" as the priority assigned by stakeholders and "output priorities" as the priority assigned from the perspective of availability of a practical solution. Another interesting topic related to prioritisation is the inclusion of a statistical method called principle components analysis (PCA). A worked example illustrates how this technique can be used to provide input to (not replace) human decision-making about the inevitable trade-offs between requirements. At the other end of the formality scale a nursery rhyme (this year, next year, sometime,...) is used to help to do triage and assign priorities to requirements.

    From a practical point of view the authors have provided substantial worked examples of techniques to aid requirements discoverers in their tasks. Examples are drawn from fields as diverse as air traffic control, tram routing, video games and restaurant management. I would also have liked to see one complete example but recognise that space constraints impose a trade-off.

    A theme that runs through the book is the need to communicate with diverse stakeholders who all have their own view of the world. The authors' wise advice is that "there is no point trying to force requirements language on people. When you're interviewing a stakeholder, don't start talking about `non-functional goals' or "quality requirements'. Ask plain questions about what people want to achieve, and what performance they are seeking".

    This book is written in a way that you would enjoy reading it from cover to cover. It is also an excellent reference book and, no matter what techniques you are using, I am willing to bet that you will find additional insights and approaches to improve your requirements work. Keep this book on the shelf by your desk, you will find yourself referencing it often.

    Suzanne Robertson
    Chamonix March 22, 2009
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    3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
    5.0 out of 5 stars One of the very best Requirements Books: BUY IT., 17 Mar 2009
    By Alistair Mavin (Derby, UK) - See all my reviews
    (REAL NAME)   
    I have never bothered reviewing a book on Amazon before, but for this I have made an exception. I have over 20 books on requirements engineering, and I can say without hesitation that this is one of the very best. This is an extremely readable and useful book.

    This book is well organised, practical and insightful. The authors propose a matrix of "Elements" and "Contexts" for requirements discovery. Following this model, the book is divided into two parts; Part 1 - Discovering Requirement Elements (with chapters on Stakeholders; Goals; Context, Interfaces, Scope; Scenarios; Qualities and Constraints; Rationale and Assumptions; Definitions; Measurements, and; Priorities), and Part 2 - Discovery Contexts (with chapters on Requirements from Individuals; Requirements from Groups; Requirements from Things; Trade-offs, and; Putting it all Together). In the Introduction, the authors state that requirements specification can be considered to be a network of related elements, "...and indeed, the chapter structure of this book can be seen as a customisable template for organising the requirements on your project."

    If pithy quotes are a good measure of the value of a book, then this is a great book. I stopped scribbling down quotes by page 10 when I had amassed the following:
    * "Requirements are discovered by the use of appropriate inquiry techniques. They are not sitting about, waiting to be `captured'."
    * "Discovery, however surprising and delightful the actual moment of realisation, comes as a result of a deliberate search."
    * "Projects need to pay attention to discovering their requirements, using a battery of complementary techniques..."
    * "Perhaps the projects in greatest danger from poor requirements work are those that seem fairly small and simple, but turn out to contain hidden complexities."

    In addition to the quotable quotes, the book is also crammed with well-crafted expressions and valid observations. A few that I liked are:
    * "goals and stakeholders work together"
    * "ill-defined boundaries"
    * "interfaces aren't just hardware"
    * "requirements archaeology" (gathering requirements from documents)
    * "Requirements Chef" (a lovely concept, included in Chapter 15, "Putting it all Together")
    * "no two projects are alike"

    This book is unusually easy to read and extremely well structured. Each chapter begins with a couple of sentences defining the questions that the chapter will answer. Next is a paragraph summarising the chapter. The reader can therefore establish, in less than a minute, whether a chapter is likely to help them with their immediate problem. Following the main body of each chapter (all of which are also very well structured), there is a "Bare Minimum of..." which, as the heading suggests, defines the least you should do for this element or context. Each chapter also includes a small but valuable set of Exercises and suggested Further Reading.

    Many people involved in system development (still) talk about "users" as a homogeneous group. Increasingly, more enlightened people talk about "stakeholders" - but I am not convinced that stakeholder analysis is actually taken seriously in many developments. For this reason I'd argue that chapter 2 of this book ("Stakeholders") is essential reading for every systems engineer/business analyst/project manager. There is a strong emphasis in this chapter (and throughout the book) on the importance of stakeholders and consideration of stakeholder roles. As ever, Ian Alexander is quick to remind us that we should always consider negative stakeholders.

    The book comfortably straddles what might loosely be called "theory" and "practice". The breadth and depth of the authors' experiences are woven throughout, with no awkward distinction between concept and application. The final chapter "Putting it all Together" does exactly what it claims. Included in this chapter is an essential table of "possible discovery context/requirement element approaches" and a set of case studies that illustrate how an element/context matrix may be populated for a specific project.

    Having read the book and made some notes for this review, I tried an experiment. I randomly opened the book in half a dozen places. On each page I quickly found something interesting and useful. I tried the same experiment with a range of other requirements books, and not one of them was nearly as satisfying. I don't suppose this is how the authors intended the book to be used, but it does give a good indication of its quality and value. There is no filler in these 450 pages. I wholeheartedly recommend this book.
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    1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
    5.0 out of 5 stars Discovering Requirements, 17 Jun 2009
    By Steve Orr (Bournemouth, UK) - See all my reviews
    (REAL NAME)   
    Discovering Requirements: How to Specify Products and Services
    In their book, Discovering Requirements, Ian Alexander and Ljerka Beus-Dukic combine their years of experience to produce a work that will be of value to the practitioner and the academic alike. It is a work that, as it says on the cover, is timely, practical and reliable.

    The book starts from the earliest project, or even pre-project, stage, where context and scope are typically unclear. Stress is placed on the importance of understanding the real business need before attempting to satisfy that need; crucial advice in the present economic climate.

    In Part 1 of the book, the reader is guided through a logical process in which the stakeholders and their goals are identified, analysed and progressively refined, leading to the creation of validated, verifiable and non conflicting requirements.

    Although there is a logical flow to part 1, the book, wisely, does not define a prescriptive process. It does however contain all the ingredients and sufficient guidance to allow the reader to create their own recipes for `processes' that can be intelligently applied to specific situations. The book's two part structure directly supports this goal; part 2 describes the contexts in which the ingredients can be used and mixed in order to discover the requirements. The final chapter of this large work contains invaluable advice on `Putting It All Together'.

    In short, this book provides a valuable addition to the literature on requirements. I can thoroughly recommend it.

    Steve Orr
    Capiro Ltd.
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    5.0 out of 5 stars Smart coherant approachs for making effective progress
    Outstanding! Its construction reflects clearly the authors are intimately acquainted with the real world and what is practicable in terms of approach. Read more
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