Karl Wiegers - Software Requirements

For Chris, yet again. Eighth times the charm.

K.W.

For my parents, Bob and Joanne, for a lifetime of encouragement.

J.B.

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The second edition of Software Requirements was published 10 years prior to this one. Ten years is a long time in the technology world. Many things have changed in that time, but others have not. Major requirements trends in the past decade include:

So, what hasnt changed? Two factors contribute to keeping this topic important and relevant. First, many undergraduate curricula in software engineering and computer science continue to underemphasize the importance of requirements engineering (which encompasses both requirements development and requirements management). And second, those of us in the software domain tend to be enamored with technical and process solutions to our challenges. We sometimes fail to appreciate that requirements elicitationand much of software and systems project work in generalis primarily a human interaction challenge. No magical new techniques have come along to automate that, although various tools are available to help geographically separated people collaborate effectively.

We believe that the practices presented in the second edition for developing and managing requirements are still valid and applicable to a wide range of software projects. The creative business analyst, product manager, or product owner will thoughtfully adapt and scale the practices to best meet the needs of a particular situation. Newly added to this third edition are a chapter on handling requirements for agile projects and sections in numerous other chapters that describe how to apply and adapt the practices in those chapters to the agile development environment.

Software development involves at least as much communication as it does computing, yet both educational curricula and project activities often emphasize the computing over the communication aspect. This book offers dozens of tools to facilitate that communication and to help software practitioners, managers, marketers, and customers apply effective requirements engineering methods. The techniques presented here constitute a tool kit of mainstream good practices, not exotic new techniques or an elaborate methodology that purports to solve all of your requirements problems. Numerous anecdotes and sidebars present storiesall truethat illustrate typical requirements-related experiences; you have likely had similar experiences. Look for the true stories icon, like the one to the left, next to real examples drawn from many project experiences.

Since the first edition of this book appeared in 1999, we have each worked on numerous projects and taught hundreds of classes on software requirements to people from companies and government agencies of all sizes and types. Weve learned that these practices are useful on virtually any project: small projects and large, new development and enhancements, with local and distributed teams, and using traditional and agile development methods. The techniques apply to hardware and systems engineering projects, too, not just software projects. As with any other technical practice, youll need to use good judgment and experience to learn how to make the methods work best for you. Think of these practices as tools to help ensure that you have effective conversations with the right people on your projects.