Customer Reviews

Managing Software Requirements: A Unified Approach (The Addison-Wesley Object Technology Series)

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As an author myself of a competing requirements book, you might expect me to pan this one. But, no, I must admit that this is one of the bext requirements books ever written. It is quite obvious that these two authors have actually lived and breathed software requirements for many, many years. The book is chock full of real-life experiences and practical advice.

Unlike many other requirements books, this one covers the full breadth of classical requirements management, including both elicitation and specification. It is not a religious piece (I mean that as a compliment) in that it does not preach any single "best" way to do anything. Instead, it offers the readers a wide range of choices: brainstorming, storyboarding, use cases, prototyping, and so on.

If you are writing requirements, you need to read this book.

Alan M. Davis

First of all, let's get to the point. If you are serious about Software Engineering this book belongs on your bookshelf. It covers the full range of topics relating to Requirements Management, from 'Defining the Problem' to 'Managing Your Customer' to 'Managing Change.' There is enough information in here to make your brain hurt, but it is presented well - with many diagrams, stories, and a conversational tone. The book focuses on large team development of large systems, but the concepts will be useful to anyone who has to manage interactions between Developers, Customers, and Users.

This book is a logical, systematic, and thorough description of the current 'state of the art' for Requirements Management, defined as ''a systematic approach to eliciting, organizing, and documenting the requirements of the system, and a process that establishes and maintains agreement between the customer and the project team on the changing requirements of the system.'' It divides the discipline into six team skills, each with its own goals, concepts, and techniques.
- Analyzing the Problem: understanding the problem that needs to be solved.
- Understanding User Needs: eliciting requirements from Users and other Stakeholders.
- Defining the System: organizing and documenting the user's requirements.
- Managing Scope: keeping the workload under control.
- Refining the System Definition: converting the user's requirements to design inputs.
- Building the Right System: implementing, verifying, and validating the system.
Finally, the authors provide a four-page recipe for getting started in your organization.

This book is well worth buying.

Managing Software Requirements gives a true-to-life overview of the problems and pitfalls inherent in getting business people and software people to speak a common language. The first six chapters leverage the authors' combined 40+ years of experience in solving business problems with software. Their insight is keen. Their advice is practical.

The section on understanding user needs, though a bit shallow at times, gives the consultant a useful collection of tools to help elicit issues from business people who have trouble expressing them.

The section on managing scope should be read by everyone who hands projects over to software development teams. These four chapters give more useful information in 38 pages than most books give in 400 pages.

I was disappointed in the light treatment of use case methodology. However, the broad overview of involving consultants in the software analysis and design process is priceless.

Anyone implementing the Rational Unified Process or similar iterative design method would find this work timely and pragmatic. This is a must read for development managers, project coordinators, business analysts, and even architecture and planning administrators.

First of all, this book is rather pleasant to read and give a good overview on different skillness needed for Software Requirements. I especially appreciate the 3 layer approach for requirements and the good description of the Vision document. On the other hand, true and effective guidelines are often missing for each technique used, and the book often stay on the description level. I personnaly prefer the Robertson's "Mastering the requirements process" which give a more strong process plan and guidelines. Nevertheless, it's not a useless reading.

This book is an excellent reference on exactly what is needed in the software requirements process. Not only does it clearly define, step by step procedures on eliciting and managing requirements, it also provides examples, templates, discussion on scope creep, verification, and other relevant areas.

The authors have made this somewhat "fuzzy" process incredibly easy to follow by breaking the book down into short, easy to read chapters. They also weave throughout the book their (sometimes amusing) past experiences. Indeed, the appendices apply their approach to other methods including RUP, CMM, ISO, etc. Great book - highly effective!

As an experienced Software Engineer the last thing I wanted to read was another book about "structured methodologies". Typically, these books are 1) hard to read and 2) frustrating to apply to real-life software development. Dean Leffingwell has addressed both of these problems in "Managing Software Requirements: A Unified Approach".

The writing is enjoyable and easy to digest. You can read it from start to finish without getting lost in academic discussions. In addition to being well written, this book addresses many of the issues we face in software development from a practical viewpoint.

Leffingwell stresses how requirements should be a living part of the development lifecycle (in contrast to the common practice of gathering and documenting requirements, then putting them on a shelf.) While it does not provide a cookbook recipe for the software development lifecycle, this book does show us how different projects require different approaches, giving some realistic examples. And it doesn't gloss over the fact that gathering requirements can be just plain hard.

This is a big and meaty book. It goes into great depth but doesn't stall out. Less technical users won't understand all of it, but will get a solid overview of the importance of requirements management. Developers will get insight into the current thinking by some of the industry leaders in requirements management and software engineering. Skeptics who are tired of the unfulfilled promises of structured methodologies will see that real progress is being made in the field of software engineering.

This is an excellent book for building a strong foundation in requirements gathering. The authors have clearly been doing requirements gathering for years and are kind of enough to share volumes of their hard fought wisdom with the rest of us. I found parts of the book, especially the beginning, a little slow to get to the point. However you can just skim any parts that might be a little drawn out and there is more than enough outstanding content to make it very worthwhile. This book provides wonderful insight, persuasive arguments, multiple views and ideas for how requirements are best gathered, a clear style of explaining concepts, and a pleasant and entertaining writing style. Requirements gathering is such a large topic that the book could not possibly teach EVERYTHING you might ever need to know about requirements gathering, but it gives an outstanding basis from which you can continue to build in whichever directions are most appropriate for you. A very expereienced requirements gatherer might find the book somewhat introductory but would certainly still gain wonderful insights from parts of the book. I think both beginners and experts will benefit from this book.

The authors for his book have incredible software engineering experience in life critical systems to include medical devices, and real time embedded systems. They successfully built a software company based primarily on their formal implementation of requirements management, which were refined over many years and grew to incorporate modern aspects of software engineering as the subtitle "A Unified Approach" suggests.

I don't believe you can find better authors who can write from their experiences of tried and true, proven techniques on requirements management. This book does not read like a dry textbook. Rather its illustrations and style keep the reader interested and informed of best practices through out the book.

This hard cover book should be a source of constant reference, if you need to understand the best requirements elicitation techniques such as: JAD sessions, requirements management workshops, storyboarding techniques, prototyping, etc...

The recent copyright (2000) and the fact that this book is part of Addison Wesley's Object Technology Series is just icing on the cake.

This is a good book to read and have in the bookself. It gets you started and even if you have knowledge of requirements management, you should see it what's inside. However I do software that is very complex (telecommunications) and for this kind of environment this book just isn't enough. I would have hoped for more compact text with fewer pictures and more concrete real world examples. This book resembles too much children's books.

Well anyway, as I said this book is anyway a must read, but you have to read more. I found many good ideas and could broaden my understanding by reading "Customer Centered Products" by Ivy F. Hooks and Kristin A. Farry.

I have survived many approaches to "capturing" a system design over the last 22 years. This book, however, lays out a tactical plan that can be used to flush out design issues up front, where the seeds of larger design problems start.

There are several references to "Quality Before Design", and this book extends those ideas into a very tangible process of requirements management. The authors were working with these ideas before the Rational system was developed, and the book ties together its approach with the Capability Maturity model and the Rational Unified process at the very end of the book.

The book is very clearly written, and organized to build upon earlier concepts and help the reader take the ideas from concept to practice.