Essential System Requirements: A Practical Guide to Event-Driven Methods (Addison-Wesley Information Technology Series)

It is a costly fact that a large percentage of information system development projects fail--ending up over budget, behind schedule, or so poorly designed that they remain unused. Essential System Requirements targets the discovery and definition of critical system requirements in the analysis phase of system development--where good design is vital to the success of a project. This book explores a design methodology that involves users early on to describe essential business events. These events then partition the system response into logical, more easily managed segments. The result is a conceptual model that reflects real business needs and accelerates the entire delivery process.

Essential System Requirements assembles the information developers need to understand and apply this methodology and condenses it into a concise and practical guide. This book reviews the development life cycle, highlights the importance of requirements, and introduces the concept of business events. It provides a detailed description of experience-based techniques and methods to analyze, specify, and partition the requirements of an information system, covering project tasks and procedures, system behavior, data and process modeling techniques, and the transition to physical design.

Inside you will also find a clear description of function point estimation, a promising method of estimating the time and cost of future software projects based on system requirements. In addition, Essential System Requirements shows you how responses to business events can be partitioned across object classes, focusing on the application of use cases in event-driven requirements analysis.

Also featured:

* A middle-out strategy that is similar to the way humans typically categorize and classify objects. * The need for rapid development combined with a sound, scalable software architecture (RAAD). * A discussion of the changing world market and the related need for adaptive business systems. * The impact of making a major paradigm switch in a corporate software environment and ways to move to an event-driven approach. * The specification of a system response to an event using a business scenario, data model, process model, entity life cycle, and event/entity interaction (CRUD) matrix.

With this book as your guide, you will have at hand proven techniques for defining the systems your clients want and setting the stage for a smoother, faster, more easily managed development process.

Bill Wiley is a consultant specializing in event-based methodology and system requirements definition. He has twenty-five years of experience in virtually all aspects of application development, spanning a wide range of systems, user groups, corporate environments, and hardware platforms. He spent eight years at the Johnson Space Center in Houston and has sixteen years of experience with manufacturing systems. His consulting experience includes methodology training and the application of event-driven analysis and design methods; he has also facilitated joint design sessions. Mr. Wiley most recently researched the application of various event-based methods during a nine-year tenure as an assistant professor of information systems at Taylor University.

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