Mastering the Requirements Process Book

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.comTopics 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.Read More