Mastering the Requirements Process

• Writing Better Requirements
• Writing Effective Use Cases (Crystal Series for Software Development)
• Business Analysis
• UML 2 and the Unified Process: Practical Object-Oriented Analysis and Design (Addison-Wesley Object Technology Series)
• Requirements by Collaboration: Workshops for Defining Needs

The heart of this book is the authors' Volere Requirements Process Model, a step-by-step guide to gathering your requisites. Throughout this book, the authors use this process to explicate a single case study--a system for a municipality that will optimise the de-icing of roadways during snowy weather. Along the way, this book provides a solid guide to identifying and refining requirements, both functional and non-functional (such as performance and ease-of-use).

There are many excellent ideas in the book, including the notion of "fitness" for your requirements, which can be later used to track whether software is successful. The book also wisely separates technology from requirements so that analysts can concentrate on understanding and modelling business problems instead of moving right away to the nuts-and-bolts of implementation. Even if you don't adopt the Volere model, any software designer can benefit from the concepts of trawling (a metaphor for the requirements gathering process), quality gateways (in which tentative requirements are evaluated for inclusion in a project) and the wise use of patterns to help simplify the process.

Anchored by numerous examples (including many samples of successful requirements), the book provides an appealing mix of new ideas along with a remarkably clear presentation. In short, Mastering the Requirements Process provides useful advice that can make the project specification building phase of the software process easier and more robust. It provides the first steps for improving overall software quality for your organisation. --Richard Dragan, amazon.com

Topics covered: Volere Requirements Process Model, project blast-off, determining requirements, user and stakeholders, project constraints, requirements constraints, use cases, business events, adjacent systems, innovation, trawling for requirements: apprenticing, interviews and videotape, functional and non-functional requirements, fit criteria, quality gateways, traceability, prototyping and scenarios, low and high-fidelity prototypes, patterns and requirements reuse, improving the requirements gathering process.

The Template is described in the Appendix, but is already introduced with all its copyright warnings on page 19. From then on your mind is cluttered with the fact, that you are lead in the licensing trap of some copyrighted methodology.

IThis is very very good stuff, 2007-01-30
This is just a gem. If you've never read anything else about requirements, start here, and when you have widened your reading,you'll still find yourself stuffing it into your bag to re-read a half-remembered chapter on the train, months or years later. Of all the requirements books this is the one that I come back to for basic common sense. It's really about software challenges, but you can extrapolate the techniques to other fields; I just wish they'd write some more stuff like this for goofball systems engineers trying to mix up software, hardware, processes and people in complex supply chains. Then I'd be in systems heaven! Their other book is great too. (They should pay me for this copy)

A gem in an under-published subject, 2003-01-14
I'd never read a book on 'business analysis' or 'requirements engineering' before. I've never studied computer science either. But I have been a business analyst for the last few years -- helping clients define their requirements, improve processes and build solutions.

"Mastering the Requirements Process" is an enlightening read. The Volere requirements engineering process is well structured, and documented in some detail. I also enjoyed the use of a UK case study, even if the language used was American English. The authors introduce an array of terminology, mostly accepted terms coined by other authors, but Robertson & Robertson's definition of terminology like 'use cases' was slightly fuzzy for someone new to requirements engineering. However, Robertson & Robertson do provide plenty of recommended reading (and even more reasons to use Amazon.co.uk). They also provide a useful website with templates and updates.

I would have given it five stars, but I think coverage of business events, use cases and inputs/outputs could have been better, and the writing could have been more concise in places.