Requirements by Collaboration: Workshops for Defining Needs (Paperback)

by Ellen Gottesdiener (Author)
Key Phrases: collaborative closure, frequent debriefs, interface navigation diagrams, Expand Then Contract, The Sieve, Wall of Wonder (more...)

Editorial Reviews

Product Description
Many software development books teach you how to build the product right. This one focuses on building the right product. Ellen Gottesdiener introduces the breakthrough Requirements Workshop technique, and demonstrates how to use it to identify customer's needs far more effectively, and specify new software systems far more quickly and accurately. The authors begin by reviewing the challenges of specifying software requirements, showing how Requirements Workshops address these challenges, and explaining the process of designing and running workshops. Through practical examples and case studies, they identify the best approaches to workshop design, and thoroughly explain the deliverables that workshops generate. This is the first book to fully integrate coverage of user requirements modeling, including UML-based use cases, business rules, and collaborative techniques designed to strengthen the relationship between IT and the business. Author Ellen Gottesdiener also introduces her breakthrough collaboration patterns -- powerful collections of group behavior that can be reused in a wide variety of software projects. For every developer, analyst, architect, and manager involved with creating or utilizing requirements specifications.

From the Back Cover
"I spend much time helping organizations capture requirements and even more time helping them recover from not capturing requirements. Many of them have gone through some motions regarding requirements, as if they were sleepworking. It's time to wake up, and do it right--and this book is going to be their alarm clock."
Jerry Weinberg, author of numerous books on productivity enhancement "In today's complex, fast-paced software development environment, collaboration--the intense peer-to-peer conversations that result in products, decisions, and knowledge sharing--is absolutely essential to success. But all too often, attempts to collaborate degenerate into agonizing meetings or ineffectual bull sessions. Ellen's wonderful book will help you bridge the gap--turning the agony of meetings into the ecstasy of effective collaboration."
Jim Highsmith, a pioneer in adaptive software development methods

Requirements by Collaboration: Workshops for Defining Needs focuses on the human side of software development--how well we work with our customers and teammates. Experience shows that the quality and degree of participation, communication, respect, and trust among all the stakeholders in a project can strongly influence its success or failure. Ellen Gottesdiener points out that such qualities are especially important when defining user requirements and she shows in this book exactly what to do about that fact.

Gottesdiener shows specifically how to plan and conduct requirements workshops. These carefully organized and facilitated meetings bring business managers, technical staff, customers, and users into a setting where, together, they can discover, evolve, validate, verify, and agree upon their product needs. Not only are their requirements more effectively defined through this collaboration, but the foundation is laid for good teamwork throughout the entire project.

Other books focus on how to build the product right. Requirements by Collaboration focuses instead on what must come first--the right product to build.

0201786060B02212002

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Product Details

• Paperback: 368 pages
• Publisher: Addison-Wesley Professional (April 20, 2002)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0201786060
• ISBN-13: 978-0201786064
• Product Dimensions: 9.2 x 7.4 x 0.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.4 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars See all reviews (15 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #166,699 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

16 of 16 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Synthesizes PD, RD and JAD, April 21, 2002

By	Mike Tarrani "www.tarrani.com" (Deltona, FL USA) - See all my reviews (TOP 500 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)    (COMMUNITY FORUM 04)

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.

19 of 20 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Definitive Facilitation and Requirements Workshop Resource, June 14, 2002

By	Karl E. Wiegers (Clackamas, OR United States) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

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.

13 of 13 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Ellen Gottesdiener achieves the complex through the simple., April 26, 2002

By	Kay Christian (Conifer, CO USA) - See all my reviews

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.