More About Software Requirements: Thorny Issues and Practical Advice

Book Description

No matter how much instruction you've had on managing software requirements, there's no substitute for experience. Too often, lessons about requirements engineering processes lack the no-nonsense guidance that supports real-world solutions. Complementing the best practices presented in his book, Software Requirements, Second Edition, requirements engineering authority Karl Wiegers tackles even more of the real issues head-on in this book.

With straightforward, professional advice and practical solutions based on actual project experiences, this book answers many of the tough questions raised by industry professionals. From strategies for estimating and working with customers to the nuts and bolts of documenting requirements, this essential companion gives developers, analysts, and managers the cosmic truths that apply to virtually every software development project.

Discover how to:

• Make the business case for investing in better requirements practices
• Generate estimates using three specific techniques
• Conduct inquiries to elicit meaningful business and user requirements
• Clearly document project scope
• Implement use cases, scenarios, and user stories effectively
• Improve inspections and peer reviews
• Write requirements that avoid ambiguity

About the Author

Karl E. Wiegers is a leading speaker, author, and consultant on requirements engineering, project management, and process improvement. As Principal Consultant with Process Impact, he conducts training seminars for corporate and government clients worldwide. Karl has twice won the Software Development Productivity Award, which honors excellence in productivity-enhancing products and books.

Customer Reviews

Karl has done it again-written a highly-readable, practical book. Here he exposes common tough questions surrounding requirements development and management including: how long it takes to "do" requirements, estimating, customer involvement, use case vs. stories or scenarios, writing textual requirements and requirements management. Karl cuts to the chase with real-world wisdom for practitioners, giving you the bottom-line advice you need to succeed with your requirements efforts.

There are hundreds, if not thousands of books on programming that talk about programming languages, programming techniques, programming aids, testing your programming, and more. Yet there is very little written on telling these programmers just what they should be programming.

This book is the exception. It is on how to specify and then manage the software project. It discusses all of the components of developing a set of requirements that will accurately reflect the real needs of the agency that will use the software. It covers all of the new buzz words like 'extreme programming,' 'cases,' 'scenarios,' and so on. Some of these it accepts, some are not reported to be helpful.

The goal of this book is to give the person or group developing the requirements sufficient tools to produce the documents that can later be used to develop the software that everyone agrees is what is needed.