Customer Reviews

Requirements by Collaboration: Workshops for Defining Needs

5 star:		(16)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

This ground breaking book blends the best of PD (Participatory Design), RD (Rapid Development) and JAD (joint application development). To this synthesis it adds modern elements such as business rules. To understand why this book is a ground breaking work a little history is in order. Participatory design (PD) began in England by Enid Mumford and was refined in Scandinavia by Pelle Ehn and Morten Kyng in the late 1970s. RD (Rapid Development) was first formalized by DuPont in mid 1980s and was then known as Rapid Iterative Production Prototyping (RIPP). JAD was first developed by Toby Crawford and Chuck Morris at IBM in 1977. Each of these approaches have one thing in common: participatory requirements elicitation accomplished in a workshop setting.

Most previous work about these approaches focused on general aspects of workshop management and requirements. Although this book certainly addresses these two aspects, it goes beyond.

This book is structured in three parts and 12 chapters. Part I covers the basics of constructing a workshop and provides a comprehensive list of deliverables. The author's web site that supports this book provides checklists and templates in Word and PDF format, which will save you time. The web site also has links to other resources that will prove extremely useful. Part II provides the workshop framework, covering logistics, managing roles and ground rules and the workshop process itself. Part III addresses the strategies for conducting the workshop. What I particularly like about this book are:

(1) It defines a process with inputs, tasks and defined outputs (deliverables).
(2) Adds structure by aligning business problems to model views, and by defining the deliverables that need to be produced to develop the model. The models views are: behavior, structural, dynamic and control. These cover the four basic business problem domains.
(3)Does not lock you into any single model (you can use multiple model types), and provides criteria for selecting the best model(s) to employ for capturing requirements.
(4) Introduces business rules, which is (in my opinion) one of the most powerful and effective means of capturing requirements.

The approach set forth is effective and thoroughly modernizes the approaches that were synthesized. More importantly it provides a structure in which to conduct participatory workshops, and clearly defines the types of goals you should be setting based on the business problem, and clear definitions of the deliverables that the workshop should produce. This book goes into my short list of best books read in 2002, and I suspect it will remain on my short list of recommended books for years to come.

Software development is approximately 50 percent about computing and 50 percent about communication. "Requirements by Collaboration" deals with the critical communication half of the problem. Ellen Gottesdiener presents a wealth of practical tools and techniques for facilitating collaborative requirements development workshops. The goal of such workshops is to arrive at a common vision of the product being specified, which gives all stakeholders confidence in achieving a successful project outcome.

This is a highly pragmatic book, not a theoretical treatise. Ellen describes in clear detail the nuts and bolts of planning and leading requirements workshops. Chapters address the Purpose, Participants, Principles, Products, Place, and Process of such workshops. Based on her extensive hands-on experience as a facilitator, Ellen presents several illustrative case studies and many tips that share her insights. These methods are broadly applicable to any type of facilitation, not just software requirements exploration.

Ellen describes some 20 different requirements models, organized ways to represent the diverse jumble of information that appears whenever people discuss their needs and the desired properties of a new product. These models provide a richness of representation that goes far beyond the list of functional requirements or even use cases that traditionally comes out of requirements workshops.

I especially like Ellen's collaboration patterns, with intriguing titles such as "Decide How to Decide," "Expand Then Contract," "The Sieve," and "Wall of Wonder." These describe recurring patterns of interaction among the members of a collaborative team. Skillful application of selected collaboration patterns can help any group achieve its objectives efficiently and with less friction than they might otherwise suffer.

"Requirements by Collaboration" is essential reading for all requirements workshop leaders. It will help both technical people and customer representatives participate effectively in these critical contributors to software success.

Gottesdiener's down-to-earth writing style combined with her extensive knowledge of requirements gathering make Requirements by Collaboration a must-have book for Product and Project Managers, Technology Leads, Business Analysts and Information Architects.

Gottesdiener employs engaging side-bars, useful figures, and a bounty of experience to explain the complex process of eliciting and describing user needs. Her infusion of quiet wisdom with extensive workshop exercises and tools energizes the reader in planning their own projects.

She has designed the workshops and exercises in such a way that they can easily apply to traditional software applications, web applications or even a pure content project that addresses a diverse audience. Her narrative examples as well as the case studies effectively transfer the concepts into something tangible.

Gottesdiener's years of software development experience coupled with her straight-forward writing style make her book a perfect choice for either a senior developer or a mid-level project manager. In addition to her technical experience, her knowledge of group dynamics round out the book by educating the reader on how to manage conflict and personality differences within a requirements team - something that is missing from most requirements textbooks.

Software and web development teams can quickly and easily put Gottesdiener's book to practice. It's a required "handbook" that will be referred to again and again.

A good book is one that gives me a few ideas that help me do my job better. A great book is one that I find myself turning to over and over.

I can tell that this is a great book because my copy is getting worn out. I've learned more from it than anything else I've read in the last several years about software requirements and I continue to refer to it. Sometimes I find a particular technique to help with the task at hand, and sometimes I reread a section in light of my recent experience on a project and learn something more subtle.

Even if you aren't using the facilitated workshop approach to requirements, this book is still very useful. I refer over and over to its collection of different requirements models and how they relate to one another. There are other books that give a much more thorough treatment of a particular tool (Cockburn's Applying Use Cases for example) but none I've seen that tie it all together so well and help you pick the right analysis tools for the job.

If you like this book, be sure to visit Ellen's web site, www.ebgconsulting.com. The Resources section has many checklists and templates that go beyond the material in the book and can save you a lot of time when preparing a requirements workshop.

I'm surprised that only eight people (as of December 2003) have read and reviewed this. It's way better than that.

This is a must read for anyone trying to create a collaborative project management environment. The website support was exceptional and the description of workshop tools, concepts and approaches should help any project team (technology or other) stay focused on the customer and the business requirements. I used it very successfully to teach a Project Management class for Technology Management MBA students and found it to be very crucial for the study and practice of collaborative work efforts. Practitioners might also consider formal facilitation training to assure success. (David Spann, MBA Director, Westminster College, Utah & Assessor for the IAF Professional Facilitator Certificate, 801-832-2655.)

There is not a great deal of literature on how to capture requirements effectively, and none that presents a workshop based approach like this. Requirements by Collaboration represents a useful contribution to the field. It's easy to read, provides useful insight into any requirements collection project, and is easy to apply. Determining whether workshops are right for your situation can be a tough call (and the book provides some guidelines early on), but if you do decide to conduct such a workshop, then this is a must read.

I'm a software developer and have a lot of experience writing Vision- and "Use Cases"-documents.

Writing these documents is not a big deal, however to make the customers read

"Use Case"-documents and provide feedback is much more difficult. But without feedback

it is not possible for a developer to write correct requirement documents.

I ordered this book because I liked the word "collaboration" in its title. It implies

the importance of working together with the customer in order to get the requirements right.

As I expected the author concentrates much more on the process to elicit proper requirements

rather than on the notations of requirements models such as UML. The best way to collaborate

with customers is to have structered meetings the so called workshops.

The book is divided into following three parts: "1. Overview of Requirements Workshops",

"2. Requirements Workshop Framework", "3. Requirements Workshop Design Strategies". Especially

the 2nd part contains a lot of detailed information and sometimes it is difficult not to get

lost. But part one and three are quit easy to follow.

Only in part one is a chapter which describes the different requirements models.

They are categorized according to their view, focus and level of detail. After reading this chapter you

know when to use which model. "Use Case"-Models are the most popular requirements models.

However, there are software projects in which other requirements model are more appropriate.

This chapter gives you an overview of the 19 different models.

Although a brief summary of every model is provided there is no example. If you want to know

the details of these different models you have to look for other sources of information.

The rest of the book concentrates on the prepartion and facilitation of workshops. A lot of useful

advice is given on how to manage people, content and processes in a workshop. Most of the

content of the book is aimed at facilitors of workshops. If you have nobody in your company who

has the necessary skillset to facilitate workshops, the author recommends to hire someone from

a consulting company, who can do this for your workshops.

On the author's website there several useful templates and guidelines which help you make your

workshops more successfull.

This book is a recommended reading for everyone who is responsible for the success of a software project.

This terrific book puts the focus where it belongs on getting effective stakeholder participation in the elicitation process. There is no other book that provides as much insight and guidance on Requirement Workshop techniques.

The things I liked best about this book are:

1. Solid documentation capturing how requirement workshops are a value-add proposition relative to other elicitation techniques.

2. The provision of multiple techniques that can be used in each element of the requirements workshop process. (It's not just the workshop itself but the process elements before and after)

3. Workshop Case studies which show how theory hits reality.

4. Superb readability and excellent presentation of material with supporting illustrations and models.

This is another must-half on the shelf of a Requirements Analyst professional. I have no hesitation in recommending this book.

In Requirements by Collaboration, Ellen Gottesdiener shares many years of experience in running requirement workshops. In this area, Ellen might be one of the most experienced facilitators in the world.

The author provides a framework for organizing requirements workshops. The framework is based on getting six Ps right. The Ps are "Purpose, Participants, Principles, Products, Place and Process". For each step it describes typical things that need to be done. First establish a share purpose. Find the right participants for the workshop. Set the principles and ground rules. Decide what work products to create (the book provides an excellent overview of work products used in requirement analysis). Define the requirements for the location and decide where to hold the workshop and decide the process to hold it.

In each steps, the author provides great tips and insights from her experience in facilitating workshops. In the later part, some strategies of requirement analysis are presented and the book ends with some case studies.

Overall, the book is well written an easy to read. The requirement workshop framework, at times seems overly complex and certainly would need to be tailored to the specific situation. However, I think this could not have been prevented when talking about a generic way of holding requirement workshops.

In Agile Development, requirement workshops are one way of doing requirement analysis and spreading the requirement analysis over the whole project. For these kind of workshops, this book is probably the only reference, eventhough the book itself does not cover this very well. Therefore "requirements by collaboration" is a must read for anyone who wants to do requirements workshops.

I found this book to be an invaluable help over the last few years that I have been running workshops with business people and users. It is concise and full of tips and how to's that are of great practical value. I can not recommend this book enough. I am a technical architect who has been thrown into the requirements and the domain traditionally inhabited by Buinsess Analyst and their ilk. I have used this book as a guide to run requirements workshops, business process workshop and scoping workshops. top book.