Mastering the Requirements Process

There is useful information in this book, but you'd be hard put to find it in the 45 minutes before your next process improvement meeting. You'd think two supposedly experienced consultants would recognize that most professionals want a reference guide, not a book that you have to read end-to-end to get the message.

The style is also sometimes unintentionally hilarious. The authors, probably trying to imitate the "you shall" statements of a requirements document, often sound dictatorial and fourth-grade teacher-ish. In a section on nonfunctional requirements they prevail on the reader to "get out your iPod." In other sections they insist that "someone at your company performs this function."

But there's some pretty useful stuff in here on show more gathering and reviewing requirements, and the requirements template is downloadable from the authors' web site. show less

Interesting, if a little repetitive in places. A big subject covered well enough. Definitely worthy as a point of reference, though by no means definitive. Valuable cross referencing, and rightly highlights the shortcomings of a book in a changing world.

I found interesting the Event-Driven Use Cases approach (chapter 4) that through Trawling (chapter 5) and Scenario (chapter 6) techniques leads to requirements discovering.

The Volere Requirements Specification Template (chapter 10) is a very useful requirements checklist.

The appendix sections (over 150 pages) have many well detailed examples.

In the other chapters there are lots of good information I enjoyed thinking to.