Customer Reviews

System Requirements Analysis

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

 

 

This author has a good following among professional systems engineers. However, this book is torture to read. Mr. Grady's writing is at times convoluted and he uses too many words to make his points. The book layout is circa 1960 style. Long monotonous paragraphs with little to no whitespace furthers the torture of reading. The diagrams are complicated, with no color, and not explained well (and most don't stand on their own).

If you can make it through this book, no doubt you will learn something. But why does it have to be such a difficult journey?

This is a really old fashioned book. Seems as not so relevant anymore. It is not an easy-to-read book as it text-burdened, too much theoretical, no enough real life examples and no enough illustrations. In addition, this book is bad edited - too much text, very long sentences, paragraphs and chapters. Most explanations are not clear.

this author obviously doesn't convey a whole lot of confidence in what he has to say because he goes off on wild tangents before he finally gets to the point. Reminds me of a co-worker, she had to explain every single detail out there! Please, I don't want to read his life story, all I care is System Requirements. In addition, his sentences intentionally drag on with lots of passive voice, never knew passive voice could be so annoying! The info is good though, but this book needs a serious fat trimming...

Thorough: Yes for classical methods, No for modern methods
Practical: No

First, my background: I have done requirements analysis before for several projects, but I had never taken a formal course. I took a course to fill in holes and answer questions I had. This book is the required text.

Now my review: This book is wordy, theoretical, and goes too much into practices that have in large part been supplanted by modern object-oriented methods. Though there is a small subsection on OO methods, it the majority of the book discusses functional analysis and decomposition. What's worse is that there is little attempt to bridge the two methods together. In my experience, a hybrid method is often preferable than strictly one or the other.

Two books I would recommend are Software Requirements by Wiegers and Systems Engineering with SysML/UML by Weilkiens. Applying UML and Patterns by Larman is also an excellent introductory text.

What impressed me the most about this book is that the author has revealed many of center issues in managing and writing system level requirements. This book is well written, very much fact-based. It varified a lot of my observations, and motivated me a lot in my research work.

This book made me want to work through my lunch break. So when I got home, my food was so delicious.