Software Requirements 3

by Karl E Wiegers, Joy Beatty

Publisher: Microsoft Press
ISBN: 0735679665

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Book Description

Now in its third edition, this classic guide to software requirements engineering has been fully updated with new topics, examples, and guidance. Two leaders in the requirements community have teamed up to deliver a contemporary set of practices covering the full range of requirements development and management activities on software projects.

• Describes practical, effective, field-tested techniques for managing the requirements engineering process from end to end.
• Provides examples demonstrating how requirements "good practices" can lead to fewer change requests, higher customer satisfaction, and lower development costs.
• Fully updated with contemporary examples and many new practices and techniques.
• Describes how to apply effective requirements practices to agile projects and numerous other special project situations.
• Targeted to business analysts, developers, project managers, and other software project stakeholders who have a general understanding of the software development process.
• Shares the insights gleaned from the authors’ extensive experience delivering hundreds of software-requirements training courses, presentations, and webinars.

New chapters are included on specifying data requirements, writing high-quality functional requirements, and requirements reuse. Considerable depth has been added on business requirements, elicitation techniques, and nonfunctional requirements. In addition, new chapters recommend effective requirements practices for various special project situations, including enhancement and replacement, packaged solutions, outsourced, business process automation, analytics and reporting, and embedded and other real-time systems projects.

Book Reviews

"I especially like the latest topic on how to apply effective requirements practices to agile projects. The practical guide and real examples of the many different requirement practices are invaluable." - Doreen Evans, Robbins Gioia Inc.

"The best book on requirements just got better! The third edition's range of new topics expands the project circumstances it covers. Using requirements in agile environments is perhaps the most significant, because everyone involved still needs to understand what a new system must do--and agile developers are now an audience who ought to have a good grasp of what's in this book." - Stephen Withall, author of Software Requirement Patterns

"The third edition of Software Requirements is finally available--and it was worth waiting so long. Full of practical guidance, it helps readers identify many useful practices for their work. I particularly enjoy the examples and many hands-on solutions that can be easily implemented in real-life scenarios. A must-read, not only for requirements engineers and analysts but also for project managers." - Dr. Christof Ebert, Managing Director, Vector Consulting Services

"Karl and Joy have updated one of the seminal works on software requirements. Irrespective of the technology, business domain, methodology, or project type you are working in, this book will help you deliver better outcomes for your customers." - Shane Hastie, Chief Knowledge Engineer, Software Education

About the Author

Karl E. Wiegers is Principal Consultant with Process Impact, a software process consulting and education company based in Portland, Oregon. Previously, he spent 18 years at Eastman Kodak Company, where he held positions as a photographic research scientist, software developer, software manager, and software process and quality improvement leader. He led process improvement activities for small teams, for a division of 500 software engineers building Kodak's digital imaging products, and for the Kodak Internet development group. As a consultant and trainer, Karl has worked with more than 100 companies in many different industry sectors and government agencies at all levels on requirements engineering, software peer reviews, process improvement, and project management. Karl received a PhD in organic chemistry from the University of Illinois. He has served on the Editorial Board for IEEE Software magazine and as a Contributing Editor for Software Development magazine.

Karl is the author of numerous books, including a memoir of life lessons titled "Pearls from Sand: How Small Encounters Lead to Powerful Lessons." He has written nearly 200 articles on many aspects of software development and management, chemistry, and military history. He is a frequent speaker at software conferences, public seminars, and professional society meetings. Karl's websites include www.processimpact.com, www.karlwiegers.com, and www.pearlsfromsand.com.

Joy Beatty, a leader in the software requirements community, has trained thousands of business analysts and helped major organizations build business-analysis centers of excellence. She is coauthor of Visual Models for Software Requirements.

Customer Reviews

The root of almost any challenge on software projects is failure to effectively communicate across the range of stakeholders, and the remedy for this is to literally get everyone on the same page with the requirements of the system.

This has traditionally been a thorny problem in software, and most people still fail to appreciate the value of investment in good requirements analysis. This book helps to clarify the value, then describes the breadth of approaches possible to help you (and others on the project) understand the needs of the system.

Unlike many books in this domain, Software Requirements 3 (like its predecessors) doesn't prescribe a particular approach for all projects, but gives you a wide range of tools that can be insightful in different situations, and provides guidance on choosing the appropriate techniques (plural) for your particular challenge.

I've taught analysis courses based on earlier editions of this book for a decade and was a reviewer of this edition, and the authors have done a great job at refreshing the material to keep it current, even though the vast majority of the insights and techniques are timeless. The size of the book might be daunting, but taking the time to understand the essential message and knowing you can come back to the book to solve particular problems as they arise is a critical investment in your career.

There are a lot of business analysis books that get too theoretical and whimsically talk about creating value without providing the solid grounding in how to go about doing it. Third Edition is practical - not only backing up the examples of what to do with descriptions of how and why, but also being a go-to reference to remind me of a few other things to ask when my memory slips a gear.

This is one you need on your shelf - you'll be going back to it frequently.

Over the years, when a novice business analyst (or someone with experience handling requirements) has asked me for a good reference, I’ve sent them to Karl Wiegers’ books. This third edition of Software Requirements is the gold standard I’ll now be recommending. Karl and Joy have done an excellent job of enriching the already-great material from the prior version, giving readers an understanding of why solid requirements are needed and illustrating practical techniques for developing and managing requirements. In addition to commonplace stories illustrating the concepts, they provide clear and useful examples of all the techniques. Practical, complete examples are essential to understanding methods an analyst hasn’t used before; like many of the subject matter experts we encounter, we “know it when we see it!”

The book is written in a flow that helps an analyst see what needs to be done from the point when an idea is first considered, to when it becomes the subject of a project, all the way through the project completion. Not all techniques work well with all types of projects, though, so the book includes sections describing adaptations of the material discussed and the specific needs of particular types of projects. They cover agile, enhancement and replacement, packaged solution, outsourced, business process automation, business analytics, and embedded and real-time projects.

While it’s a healthy-sized tome at more than 600 pages, the book is well organized and specific topics are easy to access individually. Most business analysts would benefit from reading it cover to cover, though, at least once!