Discovering Requirements: How to Specify Products and Services

"This book is not only of practical value. It's also a lot of fun to read." Michael Jackson, The Open University.

Do you need to know how to create good requirements?

Discovering Requirements offers a set of simple, robust, and effective cognitive tools for building requirements. Using worked examples throughout the text, it shows you how to develop an understanding of any problem, leading to questions such as:

• What are you trying to achieve?
• Who is involved, and how?
• What do those people want? Do they agree?
• How do you envisage this working?
• What could go wrong?
• Why are you making these decisions? What are you assuming?

The established author team of Ian Alexander and Ljerka Beus-Dukic answer these and related questions, using a set of complementary techniques, including stakeholder analysis, goal modelling, context modelling, storytelling and scenario modelling, identifying risks and threats, describing rationales, defining terms in a project dictionary, and prioritizing.

This easy to read guide is full of carefully-checked tips and tricks. Illustrated with worked examples, checklists, summaries, keywords and exercises, this book will encourage you to move closer to the real problems you're trying to solve. Guest boxes from other experts give you additional hints for your projects.

Invaluable for anyone specifying requirements including IT practitioners, engineers, developers, business analysts, test engineers, configuration managers, quality engineers and project managers.
A practical sourcebook for lecturers as well as students studying software engineering who want to learn about requirements work in industry.

Once you've read this book you will be ready to create good requirements!

Ian Alexander consults and trains on requirements. He has co-authored 3 books including Writing Better Requirements (2002, Wiley), HTML 4 (1997, Addison-Wesley) and Scenarios, Stories, Use Cases (2004, Wiley), and has published many technical papers and popular articles, including regular contributions to the IEEE Software. He runs various requirements training courses for IET, JBA, DERA, QSS and UNICOM amongst others.

Ljerka Beus-Dukic is a lecturer in software engineering and has taught Requirements Engineering for a number of years. Prior to joining academia, she worked in industry as a software engineer developing software for real-time applications. Ljerka is the author of many technical papers and was a contributor for the book (Powell D. (Ed.), A Generic Fault-Tolerant Architecture for Real-Time Dependable Systems, Kluwer Academic Publishers, 2001). She is on the programme committee for a number of conferences including ICCBSS and Euromicro and also worked on the EU funded GUARDS project. She has co-authored around 30 publications.