Essential System Requirements: A Practical Guide to Event-Driven Methods (Addison-Wesley Information Technology Series) [Paperback]

Bill Wiley (Author)

Book Description

Series: Addison-Wesley Information Technology Series | Publication Date: December 17, 1999

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. 0201616068B06012001

Editorial Reviews

From the Inside Flap

The Standish Group reports that tens of billions of dollars are wasted each year on information systems that are canceled or not used, with most projects over budget and/or late. On the other hand, the wrong system can be delivered on schedule, within budget. The primary problem has been that the system does not meet the expectations and needs of the business area for which it was built, typically because of inadequate user involvement in the early phases of system design. The challenge is to define the correct system requirements early in the delivery process to minimize design, construction, and post-implementation repair.

Accurate system requirements definition is a lost art for many organizations, but with the high cost of information systems and the competitive nature of business today, it is needed more than ever. An organization cannot afford to waste resources on post-requirements repair that could have been avoided. Essential System Requirements was written to provide a collection of event-driven methods for the analysis and specification of conceptual system requirements. I hope it will encourage and assist developers to "get it right the first time" by defining systems that are on target with the user's expectations. The term essential, as used in this book, refers to a set of system requirements that meets business-area needs without including unnecessary system capabilities. It also implies that the requirements are conceptual (non-physical) in nature. Although methods typically don't enforce a conceptual strategy, they can encourage the reduction of physical properties in the requirements. When this is accomplished, post-analysis repair can be reduced.

The most important aspect of this book is its underlying concept of business events and the partitioning of proposed systems into responses to those events. Business events are intuitive to the user and are typically accepted by both the user community and the development group. They get the user group involved early in the development life cycle by defining, in the user's language, activities that occur in the business area. Business events also help reduce the communication gap that often arises during the software development effort, and they partition the proposed system into subsystems that have relatively low coupling and support incremental development and implementation.

Essential System Requirements is a guide and therefore does not contain the amount of discussion found in most textbooks--discussion is limited to key basic concepts. It presents the methods and techniques in a concise manner to provide an effective instrument for the analyst, based on decades of software development experience. This book does not offer a particular commercial methodology but instead presents a set of core techniques and methods for the definition of system requirements. It follows a toolbox approach--that is, the methods and techniques are only used as needed, and are often repeated during the delivery process (some dependencies do exist, but iteration is the rule). For any particular project, some techniques may not be used at all. Along with the methods, this book integrates project management tips and a function-point project estimation method. It also offers a discussion of an object-oriented partitioning scheme that can be used with an event-driven user interface and that reuses many of the event-driven models.

Essential System Requirements will serve as a useful guide to the professionals responsible for the definition of system requirements and to those who manage the effort and develop the resulting system. As a guide, this book is meant to sit on your bookshelf, where, after initial study, it can be used for quick reference to the techniques and tips for the individual or the team. It can also support a corporate-wide effort to establish standards for the analysis and specification of system requirements.

For further discussion of the focus and organization of this book, please see the Introduction. 0201616068P04062001

From the Back Cover

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.

0201616068B04062001

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Paperback: 272 pages
• Publisher: Addison-Wesley Pub (Sd); 1st edition (December 17, 1999)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0201616068
• ISBN-13: 978-0201616064
• Product Dimensions: 9.1 x 7.3 x 0.6 inches
• Shipping Weight: 8 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 3.8 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (4 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,925,935 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Most Helpful Customer Reviews

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars UML is just a tool, Wiley tells us how to use the tool., September 3, 2000

By 

Norman L. Kerth "Norm Kerth" (Portland, OR USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Essential System Requirements: A Practical Guide to Event-Driven Methods (Addison-Wesley Information Technology Series) (Paperback)

Bill Wiley has written a very important book! He brings to light key discoveries made during the structured revolution and explains them to us in the context of modern day object-oriented thinking -- but I get ahead of myself:

Before objects, many great minds worked on the problem of how do we improve the process of analyzing and designing software systems." These methodologists integrated their discoveries under the umbrella called the structured methodology.

When objects came along, the new generation of software experts and methodologists rejected all ideas associated with the structured revolution largely due to ignorance, or ego. While some of the basic notation of structured design did not fit object-oriented thinking, the deeper wisdom of how to approach systems and understand what needs to be built was still most applicable.

Essential systems analysis, a core tool for thinking about systems, has been (PICK ONE: rediscovered, dusted off, repackaged, rehabilitated) by Bill at the perfect time for the evolution of object-oriented methodology maturity. With UML established, we are no longer arguing about how to express an idea and now must turn our attention to the harder questions of how to use UML to approach problems and in particular discover Use Cases.

Bill's book answers these questions and his ideas feel as good to me as my grandfather's old hand plane -- both are time-tested tools to solve problems in a most elegant and effective manner.

5 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Some excellent content, but bad style, May 19, 2000

By 

Travis Cottreau (Wellington, New Zealand) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Essential System Requirements: A Practical Guide to Event-Driven Methods (Addison-Wesley Information Technology Series) (Paperback)

This is a good book. It has all the information in it to facilitate gathering software requirements for pretty much any IT project.

My problem with the book is the author's style, he just isn't very readable. There is a lot of passive voice and not very many examples of the ideas he presents. If there are examples, they tend to be collected at the back in an appendix where they are much less useful than they would be directly with the idea that needs an example.

I feel that the author settled for a less than his best in this book, and frequently stops partway along a direction that would have been much better if it were carried through more fully.

There is a little bit of covereage of Entity Relationship Diagrams (ERD), but he gives only a handful of examples and then immediately give a diagram in a section with symbols that aren't covered in any of the previous examples.

I was really looking forward to the function point covereage, but function points are covered only marginally well in the book, something that the author pretty much says himself in the first few paragraphs of the chapter on function points.

The real strength of the book is in the ideas, which I found very useful. The business event approach is quite powerful and allows the breakdown of projects into independant pieces. Also, the author gives "tips" on project management on how to apply his methods. There are a number of tables and diagrams for representing requirements that were also helpful.

A good effort, but I feel that it could have been much better. All the ideas where there, the author mentions them regularly, but just doesn't go all the way.

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Ties it all together!, August 3, 2000

By 

Thomas R. Wilk (La Crosse, WI USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Essential System Requirements: A Practical Guide to Event-Driven Methods (Addison-Wesley Information Technology Series) (Paperback)

Mr. Wiley takes an interesting, academic approach to defining requirements based upon event-driven methods. Essential System Requirements is "a breath of fresh air" that uses a variety of diagramming techniques including the UML, but does not push the UML or a set of vendors' tools as a silver bullet. The book does an outstanding job of tying together a sound toolbox approach to extracting requirements with the function point estimation method. The section on object-partitioned system responses is also very enlightening. A must read for the independent thinker!