Essential System Requirements

It is a costly fact that a large percentage of information system development
projects fail--ending up over budget, behind schedule, or so poorly designed
that they remain unused. Essential System Requirements targets the
discovery and definition of critical system requirements in the analysis
phase of system development--where good design is vital to the success of a
project. This book explores a design methodology that involves users early on to
describe essential business events. These events then partition the system
response into logical, more easily managed segments. The result is a conceptual
model that reflects real business needs and accelerates the entire delivery
process.
Essential System Requirements assembles the information developers
need to understand and apply this methodology and condenses it into a concise
and practical guide. This book reviews the development life cycle, highlights
the importance of requirements, and introduces the concept of business events.
It provides a detailed description of experience-based techniques and methods to
analyze, specify, and partition the requirements of an information system,
covering project tasks and procedures, system behavior, data and process
modeling techniques, and the transition to physical design.
Inside you will also find a clear description of function point
estimation, a promising method of estimating the time and cost of future
software projects based on system requirements. In addition, Essential System
Requirements shows you how responses to business events can be partitioned
across object classes, focusing on the application of use cases in event-driven
requirements analysis.
Also featured:

• A middle-out strategy that is similar to the way humans typically categorize
  and classify objects.
  
• The need for rapid development combined with a sound, scalable software
  architecture (RAAD).
  
• A discussion of the changing world market and the related need for adaptive
  business systems.
  
• The impact of making a major paradigm switch in a corporate software
  environment and ways to move to an event-driven approach.
  
• The specification of a system response to an event using a business
  scenario, data model, process model, entity life cycle, and event/entity
  interaction (CRUD) matrix.

With this book as your guide, you will have
at hand proven techniques for defining the systems your clients want and setting
the stage for a smoother, faster, more easily managed development process.

Table of contents

Preface
Acknowledgments
Chapter 1: Foundational Concepts
Chapter 2: The Pervasive Nature Of Business Events
Chapter 3: Business Events And Methodology
Chapter 4: Project Procedure For Event Partitioning
Chapter 5: System Behavior
Chapter 6: System Data
Chapter 7: System Process
Chapter 8: Data/Process Interaction
Chapter 9: Transition To Physical Design
Chapter 10: Function Point Estimates And Events
Chapter 11: Function Point Example
Chapter 12: Common Techniques
Chapter 13: Class Operations
Chapter 14: Class Interaction
Appendix A: Collection Of Examples
Appendix B: Model Notation And Symbols
Appendix C: Ifpug General System Characteristics Tables
Glossary
References
Index