Overview
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
Synopsis
Have you ever delivered software that satisfied all of the project specifications, but failed to meet any of the customers' expectations? Without formal, verifiable requirements-and a system for managing them-the result is often a gap between what developers think they're supposed to build and what customers think they're going to get. Too often, lessons about software requirements engineering processes are formal or academic, and not of value to real-world, professional development teams. In More About Software Requirements: Thorny Issues And Practical Advice, the author of Software Requirements, Second Edition, describes even more practical techniques for gathering and managing the software requirements that help you meet project specifications and customer expectations. A leading speaker and consultant in the field of requirements engineering, Karl Wiegers takes questions raised by other professional software developers and architects as a basis for the practical solutions and best practices offered in this guide. Succinct and immediately useful, this book is a must-have for developers and architects.
Editorials
From Barnes & Noble
The Barnes & Noble ReviewFor years, developers who are serious about building the right software have treasured Karl Wiegers’s classic Software Requirements. Since then, they’ve asked the “guru” plenty of questions. In More About Software Requirements, Wiegers identifies the most important of those questions, and offers realistic, highly workable answers.
For instance: How do you keep too much design from being embedded in your requirements? What questions work best in requirements interviews? How do you get your customers to actually review the spec? What metrics will help you determine how well you’re doing in writing requirements? What’s the best way to define project scope? How do you get your money’s worth from requirements tools? What best practices exist for managing requirements across multiple releases?
Wiegers’s advice is relentlessly practical. Something in here will save your bacon -- likely, more than once! Bill Camarda, from the February 2006 Read Only