Software Requirements: Styles & Techniques [Paperback]

Soren Lauesen (Author)

Book Description

ISBN-10: 0201745704 | ISBN-13: 978-0201745702 | Publication Date: January 26, 2002 | Edition: 1

Most IT systems fail to meet expectations. They don't meet business goals and don't support users efficiently. Why? Because the requirements didn't address the right issues. Writing a good requirements specification doesn't take more time. This book shows how it is done - many times faster and many times smarter. This book covers many aspects of requirements. Styles: Traditional and more cost/effective ways of expressing requirements. Techniques: Ways of gathering, verifying, and maintaining requirements; ways of getting commitment from the stakeholders and support - yet limit - innovation; ways of ensuring that you meet your business goals. It discusses the styles and techniques useful for different project types, for instance software developed specifically for the customer, software bought off-the shelf and adapted for the customer (COTS), and software developed for a broad market. The book illustrates everything through real-life examples. It also deals with difficult requirements, for instance how to specify ease-of-use, how to specify very complex computations, and how to deal with 200 reports that the old system has, and the new system may or may not need. The book shows two complete, real-life specifications and large parts of several others. It also has exercises and figures for presentation.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

Suitable for most any IT professional who wants to build better software, Software Requirements: Styles and Techniques offers a surprisingly readable textbook-style treatment of software engineering's numerous attempts to get it right with defining requirements. Surveying nearly every conceivable style of defining requirements, yet remaining thoroughly practical, this book can let your organization do more with its requirements documents, which is a good step to creating software that succeeds better with your users.

Though everyone in software design knows about requirements, actual examples have usually remained shrouded in secrecy whether out of concern over client or intellectual property confidentiality. One considerable strength of this title is that the author has seen many good and bad requirements documents and has included here several complete samples for a Danish shipyard and two hospital systems.

The book begins by describing several dozen types of requirements styles, along with the advantages (and disadvantages) of each. Each requirements style differs by notation (text-based, graphical, or using Unified Modeling Language), level of audience (for nontechnical or technical users), focus (data, functional, performance, and usability), and whether it's used early or late in the project development cycle. While the author highlights those conventions that have worked best based on his extensive industry experience and research, each type of notational style gets due coverage. Sample requirements for a hotel-booking application anchor these early sections.

Not surprisingly, requirements are often hard to ascertain. The author's very thorough chapter on nearly 20 techniques to elicit requirements from users (using interviews, focus groups, and the like) is a real standout. Throughout this title, he offers plenty of advice on tracing requirements so that you can prove your software meets all user expectations. This text concludes with an extensive requirements document for a system used to track shipping repairs for a Danish shipyard, two systems for hospitals, and a membership database for a European political organization.

Reading Software Requirements will likely convince you that you can do better with your requirements documents. Though there is no one best way, certain types of requirements work for certain situations better than others. This text can help you choose. Certain to be mandatory reading for serious software analysts, this title can also benefit virtually anyone who works with software design documents. Its clear presentation style, remarkably devoid of jargon, helps make this book a great resource for a wide range of readers, whether or not they have a background in traditional software engineering. --Richard Dragan

Topics covered: Introduction to requirements, domain and product-level requirements, requirements for different project types, traditional, fast, and two-step approaches to defining requirements, types of data requirements (data models, dictionaries, data expressions, and virtual windows), types of functional requirements (including context diagrams, event and function lists, feature requirements, screens and prototypes, task descriptions, scenarios and use cases), functional details (including tables and decision tables), Unified Modeling Language diagrams used with requirements (including state, activity, class, collaboration, and sequence diagrams), requirements for product integration (for nontechnical and technical audiences), defining quality requirements, specifying accuracy, performance, and usability; security and maintainability requirements, product life cycle and requirements for each step (including contracts, proposals, design and programming, acceptance testing and delivery, requirements management, release planning, tracing and tool support), elicitation issues and techniques, stakeholders, working with focus groups, business goals and cost/benefit, domain-requirements tracing, checking and validation, real-world examples of techniques in action, case studies (and sample requirements) for a Danish shipyard database, two medical systems, a noise source location application, and a system to manage members of a political association.

From the Back Cover

 Most IT systems fail to meet expectations. They don't meet business goals and don't support users efficiently. Why? Because the requirements didn't address the right issues. Writing a good requirements specification doesn't take more time. This book shows how it¿s done - many times faster and many times smarter.  What are the highlights?

• Two complete real-life requirements specifications (the traditional and the fast approach) and examples from many others.
• Explanations of both traditional and fast approaches, and discussions of their strengths and weaknesses in different project types (tailor-made, COTS, and product development).
• Real-life illustrations of all types of requirements, stakeholder analysis, cost/benefit and other techniques to ensure that business goals are met.
• Proven methods for dealing with difficult or complex requirements, such as specifying ease-of-use, or dealing with 200 reports that might be needed because they are in the old system.

 Who is it for?  Everyone involved in the software supply chain, from analysts and developers to end users, will learn new techniques, benefit from requirements written by other specialists, and discover successes and failures from other companies. Software supplierswill find ideas for helping customers and writing competitive proposals. Programmers and other developers will learn how to express requirements without specifying technical details, and how to reduce risks when developing a system. Students aspiring to IT careers will learn the theory and practice of requirements engineering, and get a strong foundation for case studies and projects.  Who is the author? Soren Lauesen is currently professor at the IT-University of Copenhagen. He has worked in the IT industry for 20 years and has been a professor at Copenhagen Business School for 15. He has been co-founder of three educational and two industrial development organizations. His industry projects have encompassed compilers, operating systems, process control, temporal databases, and software quality assurance. His research interests include human-computer interaction, requirements specification, object-oriented design, quality assurance, marketing and product development, and interaction between research and industry. He has a broad range of other interests ranging from biology to dancing and foreign cultures.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 608 pages
• Publisher: Addison-Wesley Professional; 1 edition (January 26, 2002)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0201745704
• ISBN-13: 978-0201745702
• Product Dimensions: 9.3 x 7.3 x 1.2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 2.4 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.6 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (5 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #751,505 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

25 of 25 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Original book,! Distinctive approach for requirements., March 27, 2002

By 

Radouane OUDRHIRI (London United Kingdom) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Software Requirements: Styles & Techniques (Paperback)

Very original book; a rich source of knowledge and reflection. The approach is quite distinctive; it combines industrial and academic experience. We feel from the examples presented in the book and their conceptualisation that the author went through a long and painful (but fruitful) learning process of requirements engineering.

The author presents various techniques and models, and he stresses that there is no RIGHT model for all situations. He also discusses practical issues/problems, with a balance between pragmatism and perfection. The book discusses the types of projects, contracts and appropriate requirement elicitation/engineering techniques to be considered.

One of the rare books, that discuss seriously Quality Requirements, not from the surface and not just by listing them from standards, but in details with practical examples, especially usability.

I highly recommend this book for anyone who deals with requirements! Practitioners, students and teachers.

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Best book on SW requirements, March 17, 2008

By 

Rantanen Antti - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Software Requirements: Styles & Techniques (Paperback)

"Software requirements - styles and techniques" is best book I have ever read on SW requirements.

I fully recommend it to anyone involved in requirements analysis. Not a "theoretical" book but one with great practical information. It has also fulll examples of requirement specs!

I invite anyone interested in taking look at slides that are available in author's website. They give you an good overview on books value. When I saw these slides and "Task & Support" requirements style I just had to buy this book.

I am not involved in any way with the author. I just want to give this good review because I feel the book can FINALLY shed light on requirements analysis with CONCRETE examples of requirements and not just some academic theories.

6 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Excellent material, April 18, 2003

By 

"niklasnasen" - See all my reviews

This review is from: Software Requirements: Styles & Techniques (Paperback)

If you've ever worked/will work with getting requirements in a software project, you can't go wrong with this book. Taking you first through the basics, Lauesen then goes on to discuss the different techniques of specifying requirements under different conditions. Man, this is gonna save your bacon one of these days... :)