Quantity:

More Buying Choices

19 used & new from �19.44

Have one to sell? Sell yours here

Discovering Requirements: How to Specify Products and Services

See larger image

Share your own customer images

Publisher: learn how customers can search inside this book.

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 (6 customer reviews)

RRP:	�34.99
Price:	�21.71 & this item Delivered FREE in the UK with Super Saver Delivery. See details and conditions
You Save:	�13.28 (38%)
	o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o

In stock.
Dispatched from and sold by Amazon.co.uk. Gift-wrap available.

Want guaranteed delivery by Tuesday, November 10? Choose Express delivery at checkout. See Details

18 new from �19.44 1 used from �37.20

Other Editions:	RRP:	Our Price:	Other Offers:
Unknown Binding			Order it used

Frequently Bought Together

Price For All Three: �64.85

Show availability and shipping details

This item: Discovering Requirements: How to Specify Products and Services by Ian Alexander
In stock.
Dispatched from and sold by Amazon.co.uk.
This item Delivered FREE in the UK with Super Saver Delivery. See details and conditions
Writing Better Requirements by Ian Alexander
In stock.
Dispatched from and sold by Amazon.co.uk.
This item Delivered FREE in the UK with Super Saver Delivery. See details and conditions
Mastering the Requirements Process by Suzanne Robertson
In stock.
Dispatched from and sold by Amazon.co.uk.
This item Delivered FREE in the UK with Super Saver Delivery. See details and conditions

Customers Who Bought This Item Also Bought

Writing Better Requirements

by Ian Alexander

4.5 out of 5 stars (2) �18.57

Writing Effective Use Cases (Crystal Series for Software Development)

by Alistair Cockburn

4.5 out of 5 stars (11) �14.47

Mastering the Requirements Process

by Suzanne Robertson

4.3 out of 5 stars (6) �24.57

Requirements by Collaboration: Workshops for Defining Needs

by Ellen Gottesdiener

5.0 out of 5 stars (1) �24.71

Scenarios, Stories, Use Cases : Through the Systems Development Life-Cycle

by I. Alexander

�25.49

› Explore similar items

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 (6 customer reviews)

Amazon.co.uk Sales Rank: 51,751 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)
Popular in this category:
#36 in Books > Business, Finance & Law > Management > Human Resources > Professional Development

Would you like to update product info or give feedback on images?

See Complete Table of Contents

Customers Viewing This Page May Be Interested in These Sponsored Links

(What is this?)

Laurie Young Marketing opens new browser window

www.lauriedyoung.com - Marketing & Business Development - expert advice for service firms

Requirements opens new browser window

www.Ask.com - Find the Best Results for Requirements!

Products How To opens new browser window

www.Fixya.com/Products+How+To - We Are Here To Help You For Free! Solving Problems Is Easy As 123.

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!

Tags Customers Associate with This Product

(What's this?)

Click on a tag to find related items, discussions, and people.

requirements engineering(2)

See all 14 tags...

What Do Customers Ultimately Buy After Viewing This Item?

	86% buy the item featured on this page: Discovering Requirements: How to Specify Products and Services 5.0 out of 5 stars (6) �21.71
	7% buy Writing Better Requirements 4.5 out of 5 stars (2) �18.57
	3% buy Scenarios, Stories, Use Cases : Through the Systems Development Life-Cycle �25.49
	2% buy Writing Effective Use Cases (Crystal Series for Software Development) 4.5 out of 5 stars (11) �14.47

Explore similar items

Customer Reviews

6 Reviews

5 star:		(6)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

Average Customer Review

5.0 out of 5 stars (6 customer reviews)

Share your thoughts with other customers:

Create your own review

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

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.

Comment Comment | Permalink | Was this review helpful to you? Yes No (Report this)

3 of 4 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

Comment Comment | Permalink | Was this review helpful to you? Yes No (Report this)

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Before you start a project, this is THE book to read, 27 Jul 2009

By	Kari Hirvi (Finland) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

Fantastic book! Have you ever struggled to find out what your customer actually wants? And after you're well on the way with your project, you start getting customer comments like: "yes, but..", "I didn't mean that..", etc. And then you begin to feel like "uh, oops, we really should have elaborated more on defining the requirements...".

But the term defining implies that your customer tells what they want and you write it down in a meeting, polish later on, and that's it. Go on and start a project ... and problems like above surfaces.

Requirements need to be discovered and this is the best book on how to systematically "tease" out what the customer (=stakeholders) want, what are they assuming, but not saying unless explicitly asked, etc.

The "abstraction level" is very good, not too cookbook specific and not too academically general. Text is very readable and clear and well structured.

This book helps you to direct your (and your customer) thinking to obtain desired goals, and thus is valuable also for people outside the engineering field.

Comment Comment | Permalink | Was this review helpful to you? Yes No (Report this)

Share your thoughts with other customers: Create your own review

› See all 6 customer reviews...

Most Recent Customer Reviews

5.0 out of 5 stars Discovering Requirements
Discovering Requirements: How to Specify Products and Services
In their book, Discovering Requirements, Ian Alexander and Ljerka Beus-Dukic combine their years of experience... Read more

Published 4 months ago by Steve Orr

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

Published 6 months ago by A. J. Gavaghan

5.0 out of 5 stars Discovering Requirements
Ian Alexander's latest requirements book is a pleasure to read. He and his co-author have succeeded in producing a book that represents the latest thinking in requirements... Read more

Published 7 months ago by Marcus Price

› See all 6 customer reviews...

.jsOffDisplayBlock { display: block; } .jsOffDisplayInline { display: inline; } .jsOffVisibility { visibility: visible; } .jsOnDisplayBlock { display: none; } .jsOnDisplayNoneBlock { display: block; } .jsOnDisplayNoneInline { display: inline; } .jsOnDisplayInline { display: none; } .jsOnVisibility { visibility: hidden; } .jqOnDisplayBlock { display: none; } .jqOnDisplayInline { display: none; } .jqOnVisibility { visibility: hidden; } .jqOnDisplayNoneBlock { display: block; } .jqOnDisplayNoneInline { display: inline; }