Customer Reviews

Effective Requirements Practices

5 star:		(9)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

As a software engineer, I found Dr. Young's book to be practical and very useful. My project has been implementing six of his ten "Recommended Requirements Practices," and they have indeed proved to be effective, as advertised. The book is organized around the 10 requirements practices, but covers a very wide range of other issues that influence project success - including such diverse topics as project management, team partnering, process definition, and project communication. The book and accompanying CD are loaded with templates and examples; we've reused a couple of them to produce deliverables for our customers.

The book doesn't have lots of "textbook" things like review problems and quizzes; it's much more focused on real-world implementation than some other requirements books (like the ones that are obviously the collected notes from some professor's undergraduate class). There is a glossary, and two good indexes (by author and by subject) that are accurate and at the right level of detail to make the book effective as a reference. The other thing that has kept this book on my ready-reference shelf is the annotated bibliographies - each chapter ends with a list of key references (mostly books and articles), with explanations of why they are significant, what they contain, and URLs for the ones that are available on the web.

Dr. Ralph Young has produced a book from a practitioners standpoint. Dr. Young has spent many years working in the world of systems and software engineering and for the last ten years has put great emphasis on requirements. He has developed and refined a process for emerging the real requirements based on research and actual practice. The detailed process flows are those developed by a team of requirements specialists and used repeatedly by Litton PRC to achieve CMM Level 5. You may not be ready to step into all of this on day one, but you will have a road map to follow as you increase your organization's maturity level. Why start at ground level when you can stand on the shoulders of a proven process that is described in detail in this book?

In addition to providing recommendations for best practices, Dr. Young gives the reader a nineteen page bibliography of almost everything written on the subject of requirements. This up-to-date list including many books from 2000, combined with Key References and Suggested Reading for each chapter, will give you the best cross-reference library you can find anywhere and he even provides this on a CD-ROM.

This book is a rich up to date source of the best thinking and practices
regarding requirements. It is a systems engineering book, and is rich in the
motivation/organization/process aspects of dealing with requirements
throughout the life cycle. I especially appreciated the rich pointers to
easily accessible websites for referenced material. The author has personal
contact with the best people in the business, and has managed to collate
their experience and advice with his own large scale experiences. This is
not a book on specific methods for expressing requirements. It is a
manager's book. When my son said "Dad I only want you to recommend the best
of what you read", I handed him my copy.

After 30 years of project management experience including managing project managers, I thought I knew it all. This book has allowed me to better understand some of the processes I have been using for years and provided several new (to me) requirements analysis tools. I am now using Effective Requirements Practices as a reference tool in my current projects.

I am currently mentoring a couple of project managers. Because the requirements process is the keystone of all projects and the practices provided in this book are so well presented I bought additional copies for their reference libraries.

A pretty quick read and very informative.

I have a different perspective on Dr. Young's book than many engineers. I am actually a technical writer who specializes in writing requirements. I also have a teaching background. Effective Requirements Practices is a very well written book that effectively teaches you about the entire requirements process. Some features that I liked about Dr. Young's book are:

WELL WRITTEN STYLE. He defines his vocabulary and uses simple clear language. He summarizes important information into charts, checklists, flowcharts, and bulleted lists. He follows a logical outline so I can locate the specific chapter I need quickly.
APPLICABLE ADVICE. I liked the criteria of a good requirement. It gave me specific questions I could ask to see if the requirement was good.
PROCESS OVERVIEW. This book helped me understand other's roles in the requirements process so I could work better as a team.
EXPANDABLE RESOURCES. He gives informative summaries of applicable websites, papers, or books. I can expand to other resources when I need to research a specific topic.
CURRENT RESEARCH. Dr. Young gives great dollars-and-cents examples of why we need effective requirements practices. This has helped sell the requirements process to management.
INFORMATION CD. The CD contains templates, checklists, vocabulary, and visuals that you can use to help establish your requirements practice.

Whether you are going to focus on a few chapters or the entire book, Effective Requirements Practices is a "must-have" if you work with requirements.

This book is more applicable to product and system engineering than software requirements, but contains information and techniques that will be useful to software engineers as well. Regardless of the effort, product/systems engineering or software, this book is a wonderful resource for project managers who are responsible for any kind of project because of the impact bad requirements have on cost and schedule.

The approach used is a ten-step process for requirements elicitation and management, with a chapter devoted to each of the steps. The steps are: Commit to the approach, Establish and utilize a Joint Team responsible for the requirements, Define the real customer needs, Use and continually improve a requirements process, Iterate the system requirements and architecture,Use a mechanism to maintain project communication, Select familiar methods and maintain a set of work products, Perform requirements verification and validation, Provide an effective mechanism to accommodate requirements changes, Perform the development effort using known, familiar proven industry, organizational, and project best practices.

While these steps are both logical and represent common wisdom, they are not easy to implement and manage. This is where the book is valuable because the author provides insights and advice for implementing and managing each step.

There are some surprises in the book. For example, the chapter on defining real customer needs did not address quality function deployment (QFD), which is a common tool for accomplishing this task. However, the requirements attribute matrix that is discussed is closely related to QFD and is an effective tool. I particularly liked the PREview process that is provided. This requirements process stands for process and requirements engineering viewpoints, and was first published in Requirements Engineering: A Good Practice Guide by Sommerville and Sawyer. I also liked the operational concept definition template that is provided in the book, which is an excellent format with which to not only document requirements, but to place them within the context of scope. This is an important point from a project manager's perspective. Chapter 12 is also valuable in that it's a five-page checklist for the requirements-related activities that should be used on every project.

Interestingly, while the author provides a comprehensive list of requirements management tools that is among the most complete listing I have seen in print he misses NASA's Automated Requirement Measurement (ARM) tool that is public ally available.

Mr. Young makes good use of illustrations, tables and statistics throughout this book to reinforce his approach, which makes this a valuable reference as well as a "how-to" text. I highly recommend this book to PMs managing a product, system or software project, and to anyone who is a requirements practitioner.

When I got a note from Ralph Young I thought, oh my gosh, YARB! (Yet Another Requirements Book). Why do we have so many books on Requirements? Reading Dr. Young's book gave me the insight to answer the question. I must admit, it was more inspiration than quotation. Requirements work is communication work. What methods and/or tools can you use to get abstract ideas out of one head and into the head of another? Nobody has solved this question for basic human interaction let alone complex technical work! How did I get this insight from this book? Many of the shops that I have worked with to develop requirements processes have been small to mid size firms. Dr. Young's book appears to be ideally suited for the big to enormous size shops. What I saw in the book was a degree of formality that would never be tolerated at the small shops. However, given the context of enormous organizations, the practices presented are approprate *communication* practices. His book is a nice collection of tools for your toolbox. So I give the book four stars. Not that it is THE book on requirements. It is a YARB by all accounts. However, the great references at the end of each chapter are worth the price. Small shop folks can use that to start the jouney because the practices presented are not tailored for you. The style and vocabulary were a bit formal as well but not overly difficult to read. Enjoy.

This book is great if you are looking for a high level book on to manage a customer, but there is not much real meat when it comes to the requirements. Example: he suggests having a workshops to build communication between the customer and the supplier. However, there is not much there in the first half of the book on how to go about actually gathering and managing reqrirements.

I am looking for a book to help me when I already have good communications with my customer, and I need to start producing results.

I am returning this book

After the good reviews that this book received, I was quite disappointed in this book. Ralph Young presents lots of good ideas from his experience, however they don't seem to have been well organised into a coherent flow. I'm sure that people who already have a fair amount of expertise in requirements management would pick up a number of useful ideas from this book, but I don't think that you get a coherent or complete picture about managing requirements from reading this book. For example, section 3 is called "Define the real customer needs". There are a number of suggestions on how to do this, like having a champion, training developers on how to write better requirements, but there is almost nothing on techniques for gathering requirements. This section also provides a template for an operational concept document (OCD), but this does not seem to have any significant connection to the rest of the section.

Dr Young's seems to be from a software development background, so possibly this book would be more useful to those involved in software requirements. I deal with mostly deal with requirements for physical systems, such as land vehicles.

On the plus side, the writing style is quite engaging and readable. The number of references to other texts is astonishing, and very useful. The bibliography contains 18 pages of references - Dr Young must spend a lot of time reading!

On the negative side - the print quality is not very good (poor quality paper?), and the presentation of the information, graphics and formatting is very basic.

Effective Requirements Practices very well describes the contents of this book. It is clear that Ralph has experienced all the corners of the requirements process, over the full system life cycle. He packages his experience in very complete, clear and practical advice. Even if you have a lot of experience in software or systems engineering projects, you will probably still find a lot of helpful information. I wanted to write a book on Requirements Engineering myself. Reading Ralph's book made me understand that that's not needed any more. Use it as a cook book full of good and effective recipes: just follow his advice and your chances of project success are greatly increased.