Managing Software Requirements

The authors are skilled practitioners who have spent their careers in the trenches building high-quality applications, including safety-critical, real-time systems. Using an informal, approachable style, their own war stories, and a comprehensive case study they show how designers and developers can effectively identify requirements by employing the power of use cases and more traditional forms of requirements expression. The book illustrates proven techniques for determining, implementing, verifying, and validating requirements. It describes six vital Team Skills for managing requirements throughout the lifecycle of a project: Analyzing the Problem, Understanding User Needs, Defining the System, Managing Scope, Refining the System Definition, and Building the Right System. Managing Software Requirements specifically addresses the ongoing challenge of managing change and describes a process for assuring that project scope is successfully defined and agreed upon by all stakeholders.

Topics covered include:

• The five steps in problem analysis
• Business modeling and system engineering
• Techniques for eliciting requirements from clients, users, developers, and other stakeholders
• Applying and refining use cases
• Prototyping
• Organizing and managing requirements information
• Establishing project scope and managing customers
• Using both informal and technical methods for specifying requirements
• How to measure and improve the quality of your product's requirements
• Moving from requirements to implementation
• Verifying and validating the system
• Managing change

The book concludes with a step-by-step guide to incorporating these powerful techniques into future projects.

Table of contents

Foreword
Preface
Introduction
Chapter 1: The Requirements Problem
Chapter 2: Introduction to Requirements Management
Chapter 3: The Software Team
Chapter 4: The Five Steps in Problem Analysis
Chapter 5: Business Modeling
Chapter 6: Systems Engineering of Software Intensive Systems
Chapter 7: The Challenge of Requirements Elicitation
Chapter 8: The Features of a Product or System
Chapter 9: Interviewing
Chapter 10: Requirements Workshops
Chapter 11: Brainstorming and Idea Reduction
Chapter 12: Storyboarding
Chapter 13: Applying Use Cases
Chapter 14: Role Playing
Chapter 15: Prototyping
Chapter 16: Organizing Requirements Information
Chapter 17: The Vision Document
Chapter 18: The Champion
Chapter 19: The Problem of Project Scope
Chapter 20: Establishing Project Scope
Chapter 21: Managing Your Customer
Chapter 22: Scope Management and Software Development Process Models
Chapter 23: Software Requirements
Chapter 24: Refining the Use Cases
Chapter 25: A Modern Software Requirements Specification
Chapter 26: On Ambiguity and Specificity
Chapter 27: Quality Measures of Software Requirements
Chapter 28: Technical Methods for Specifying Requirements
Chapter 29: Building the Right System Right: Overview
Chapter 30: From Requirements to Implementation
Chapter 31: Using Traceability to Support Verification
Chapter 32: Validating the System
Chapter 33: Using ROI to Determine the V&V Effort
Chapter 34: Managing Change
Chapter 35: Getting Started
Appendix A
Appendix B
Appendix C
Appendix D
Appendix E
Bibliography
Index