software design

First of all, let's get to the point. If you are serious about Software Engineering this book belongs on your bookshelf. It covers the full range of topics relating to Requirements Management, from 'Defining the Problem' to 'Managing Your Customer' to 'Managing Change.' There is enough information in here to make your brain hurt, but it is presented well - with many diagrams, stories, and a conversational tone. The book focuses on large team development of large systems, but the concepts will be useful to anyone who has to manage interactions between Developers, Customers, and Users.

This book is a logical, systematic, and thorough description of the current 'state of the art' for Requirements Management, defined as ''a systematic approach to eliciting, organizing, and documenting the requirements of the system, and a process that establishes and maintains agreement between the customer and the project team on the changing requirements of the system.'' It divides the discipline into six team skills, each with its own goals, concepts, and techniques.
- Analyzing the Problem: understanding the problem that needs to be solved.
- Understanding User Needs: eliciting requirements from Users and other Stakeholders.
- Defining the System: organizing and documenting the user's requirements.
- Managing Scope: keeping the workload under control.
- Refining the System Definition: converting the user's requirements to design inputs.
- Building the Right System: implementing, verifying, and validating the system.
Finally, the authors provide a four-page recipe for getting started in your organization.

This book is well worth buying.

Managing Software Requirements gives a true-to-life overview of the problems and pitfalls inherent in getting business people and software people to speak a common language. The first six chapters leverage the authors' combined 40+ years of experience in solving business problems with software. Their insight is keen. Their advice is practical.

The section on understanding user needs, though a bit shallow at times, gives the consultant a useful collection of tools to help elicit issues from business people who have trouble expressing them.

The section on managing scope should be read by everyone who hands projects over to software development teams. These four chapters give more useful information in 38 pages than most books give in 400 pages.

I was disappointed in the light treatment of use case methodology. However, the broad overview of involving consultants in the software analysis and design process is priceless.

Anyone implementing the Rational Unified Process or similar iterative design method would find this work timely and pragmatic. This is a must read for development managers, project coordinators, business analysts, and even architecture and planning administrators.

Software requirements begin with business objectives, definition, requirements, and expectations. Business community always looks at the bigger picture, on the other hand, systems or business analyst merely focus on specific information, result is the actual requirements get lost between the translations and the software projects fail or are delayed and exceed their budget. This book eloquently spells out six skills crucial for defining comprehensive software requirements, like analyzing the problem, understanding user needs, defining the system, managing scope, refining system definition and system validation. If you have difficulties in defining and maintaining the system requirements, this book could significantly improve the focus. However, this book fails to explain the gap between business objectives and outcome. However, linking this book to preliminary step of software development would overcome initial snag, ensuring the system design and implementation likely to be successful. By Vivek Dixit, Stanford.edu