Requirements Engineering: A Good Practice Guide (Paperback)

~ Ian Sommerville (Author), Pete Sawyer (Author) "This chapter introduces the notion of requirements engineering and requirements engineering process improvement..." (more)
Key Phrases: traceability policies, global system requirements, engineering process maturity, Addison Wesley, Benefits Key, Develop Complementary System Models (more...)

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

Defining what the customer wants is often a difficult aspect of creating successful software. However, Ian Sommerville and Pete Sawyer handle the topic with intelligence and depth in Requirements Engineering: A Good Practice Guide. The authors provide practical advice on how to make sure you deliver quality software that the customer wants and needs, all within budget.

The text first outlines what requirements engineering is and how it fits into the software engineering process. The authors then use a question-and-answer approach, short chapters, and highlighted tips to show how to define and develop a process for creating reliable software in your organization. Sommerville and Sawyer consider some ad hoc ways to improve your customer requirements documents and some more rigorous approaches, such as ISO 9000 standards for software engineering and formal specifications (where the correctness of software can be proved mathematically). Requirements Engineering can be a little dry, but it covers a vital area of software design that can benefit almost all developers.

Product Description

"A marvellous book…a unique focus on what practising engineers need to do.The goal of requirements engineering is to produce a set of system requirements which, as far as possible, is complete, consistent, relevant and reflects what the customer actually wants. Although this ideal is probably unattainable, the use of a systematic approach based on engineering principles leads to better requirements than the informal approach which is still commonly used. This book presents a set of guidelines which reflect the best practice in requirements engineering. Based on the authors’ experience in research and in software and systems development, these guidelines explain in an easy-to-understand way how you can improve your requirements engineering processes. The guidelines are applicable for any type of application and, in general, apply to both systems and software engineering. The guidelines here range from simple ‘common sense’ to those which propose the introduction of complex new methods. The guidelines and process improvement schemes have been organised so that you can pick and choose according to your problems, goals and available budget. There are few dependencies between guidelines so you can introduce them in any order in your organisation. Guidelines presented in the book

• are consistent with ISO 9000 and CMM
• are ranked with cost/benefit analysis
• give implementation advice
• can be combined and applied to suit your organisation’s needs
• are supported by a web page pointing to RE tools and resources

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Product Details

• Paperback: 404 pages
• Publisher: Wiley (April 28, 1997)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0471974447
• ISBN-13: 978-0471974444
• Product Dimensions: 9.1 x 6.8 x 1.2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.7 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.8 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (4 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #719,526 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

12 of 12 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Great for use at different levels, August 28, 1998

By	Doug Childs ([e-mail]) (Atlanta) - See all my reviews

I've been in this part of the business for a while and I haven't seen anything quite like this book for requirements. A nice blend of theory and VERY practical advice, you can easily use the book in at several ways: 1. Better understanding of a particular techniques' effectiveness and context, for example use cases (called viewpoints here) or state-transition diagrams. 2. Flip through the book and see which guidelines you can most effectively apply to your current project, e.g. building a database or putting in a table of contents. 3. Evaluate your "maturity level" & determine how to improve your current requirements process.

I can't tell if would be helpful to someone who had never wrestled with serious requirements, but even then, it has a good bibliography & website.

Belongs on the analyst's working bookshelf.

10 of 11 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars Some decent suggestions, but fluff to content ratio is 5:1., August 13, 1999

By A Customer

There are some usable guidelines for requirements gathering, though I feel common sense would give you many of them. I think this book is watered down heavily to fill 350 pages; the content could have fit in 50 pages. The book was not thought out.

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Valuable advices, but not for beginners, December 4, 2000

By	Christophe Addinquy (Paris, France) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

I found this book very insightfull, but it needs to have a first idea about what is the requirements engineering and how it's processed. Once you have this idea, this book helps you. You'll find here, essentially pieces of advices which looks like process patterns (in my opinion it should even improve the book to show these advices through a pattern form) to tackle specific problems whith requirements engineering. Moreover, these advices can be read separately. For the beginners, it mises a strong frame along the book to know what is exactly requirements management and so on. But I think the authors are right to do not try to satisfy everybody. As a weakness, I don't know why, but this book seems to be a bit old, where the edition date is only 1997, through a lot of details I feel to read a book written in the early 1980s. But this book is not about technology, so it's not a big weakness.