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Software Requirements Essentials: Core Practices for Successful Business Analysis
by Karl Wiegers and Candase Hokanson is a concise and highly readable book that describes 20 requirements practices that every software team should perform.
They are valuable for both agile and traditional project teams.
These core practices help project and product teams understand the business problem, engage the right participants, articulate
effective solutions, communicate information among stakeholders, implement the right functionality in the right sequence, and adapt to change.
If you don't have time to read one of the big books on requirements or business analysis, read this short one.
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Have you ever noticed how many products appear to be designed by someone who has never used a product of that kind before?
The Thoughtless Design of Everyday Things
presents more than 160 examples of thoughtlessly-designed products, along with nearly 50 examples of particularly
good designs. These poor designs reveal 70 insightful design lessons, which are aligned with 9 fundamental principles of
good design. This book will be insightful and thought-provoking for both new and experienced designers, as well as
interested and curious consumers.
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Software Requirements, 3rd Edition (co-authored with Joy Beatty)
won an Award of Excellence from the Society for Technical Communication. Covering the full scope of requirements development
and management, this comprehensive good practice guide can help anyone in the business analysis role elicit, analyze,
document, validate, and manage the requirements for any project. Topics include:
- The role of the business analyst and the skills and knowledge needed
- Elicitation techniques
- Writing clear and effective requirements
- Quality attributes and other nonfunctional requirements
- Visual analysis modeling techniques
- Data requirements, including specifying reports and dashboards
- Requirements prioritization, reuse, and prototyping
- Requirements for agile projects and how to apply specific practices to agile projects
- Requirements for specific classes of projects: business process automation, packaged solutions, enhancement and replacement, outsourced, business analytics, and real-time systems
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More About Software Requirements: Thorny Issues and Practical Advice addresses many questions that requirements analysts ask over and
over again, most of which are not covered well in the current books on software requirements.
Some of these thorny problems don't have perfect solutions, but the book offers
practical options and ways to select the best approach in a given situation. Chapters cover points of confusion around use cases, how to
optimize customer involvement, different ways to represent requirements knowledge,
and some key issues regarding requirements management. There's a wealth
of advice on how to write excellent software requirements at an appropriate level of detail and
without unnecessary design constraints.
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Successful Business Analysis Consulting: Strategies and Tips for Going It Alone
presents countless insights I've acquired in more than 20 years as an independent consultant. This is the kind of information I wish I had had before
I decided to give consulting a try. If you have questions about setting prices,
negotiating agreements, dealing with difficult clients, partnering with other consultants, giving presentations, writing for publication,
or generating revenue while you sleep, this book has answers.
Even if you aren't an independent consultant, you'll find a lot of valuable information in this book.
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Practical Project Initiation: A Handbook with Tools addresses the process of conceiving, approving, and launching a new project.
This book describes many actions that lay the foundation for a successful project. Both experienced and novice project managers will find the practices described here to be valuable.
Topics covered include: defining project success criteria and product release criteria,
project chartering, risk management, lessons learned and project retrospectives, metrics,
and many others. Each chapter includes several practice activities and worksheets to
help you begin applying the techniques immediately. A companion page
provides numerous templates, procedure descriptions, spreadsheet tools, and other work aids to
help you launch your next project more effectively.
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Peer Reviews in Software: A Practical Guide
is a concise description of software peer reviews
and inspections. It covers the inspection process in some detail, but it also describes a variety
of other review types that cover a spectrum of formality. Several chapters address the cultural and interpersonal
aspects of peer reviews, installing a review program in an organization, and recording and using inspection
metrics. The emphasis is on a simple, practical approach to these important quality techniques that any organization can apply.
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Creating a Software Engineering Culture
won a Productivity Award from Software Development magazine.
A healthy software engineering culture is one in which managers and practitioners share a commitment to building quality software through the
application of effective and sensible software processes. The book describes 14 cultural principles that I think are important in guiding how software is built.
If you share my belief that these principles are important, you'll apply technical and managerial practices that I think will lead to superior software.
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E-books
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In my forensic mystery novel, The Reconstruction, a forensic sculptor is shocked to discover she has a close personal connection
to the subject ofher latest forensic facial reconstruction. She is then driven to identify the victim, confirm their relationship, and deliver justice for her death.
Totally different from my technical books, The Reconstruction is an engaging mystery that will hold your attention. It was also the
most fun I ever had writing something.
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Pearls from Sand: How Small Encounters Lead to Powerful Lessons is a memoir of life lessons that I learned from otherwise ordinary conversations and experiences. Each of the 37 chapters describes a powerful life lesson,
how I learned it, how I've used it, and how you can use it to enhance your own life. The lessons are grouped into 6 categories:
personal pearls, interpersonal pearls, motivational pearls, cautionary pearls, practical pearls, and professional pearls.
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Requirements
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"So You Want to Be a Requirements Analyst?" Everyone talks about "requirements analysis," but not much is said about
the requirements (or business) analyst. What kind of person should do this job? What do analysts really do? What do they need to know?
This article addresses these questions and summarizes some key analyst skills: listening, interviewing,
analysis, facilitation, observation, writing, modeling, and more. Tips for the new analyst coming from
either the technical or the user domain are also provided.
"Requirements When the Field Isn't Green." Many software project involve adding enhancements to existing
systems, rather than developing brand new, "green field," systems. This article describes
seven principles that can guide how you apply sound requirements engineering practices
on a maintenance project.
"The Habits of Effective Business Analysts." The requirements analyst plays an essential role on the software project
team. Here I describe the habits, practices, and characteristics of effective business analysts. A list of critical skills the effective BA should master is also included.
"When Telepathy Won't Do: Requirements Engineering Key Practices." The best way to succeed with requirements engineering is to adopt known
industry best practices. Eight such key practices are described in this article, helping any
organization improve the way it elicits, analyzes, specifies, verifies, and manages its requirements.
"10 Requirements Traps to Avoid." This article describes ten traps lurking in the requirements engineering
minefield. Several symptoms that you might be stepping into each trap are presented, along with some suggested
strategies for avoiding the trap or extricating yourself from it.
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Project Management
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"Are We There Yet? Defining Product Release Criteria" Defining your product's release criteria is an essential part of laying the
foundation for a successful project. "It's June 30, so we must be done" isn't the
best plan. Your criteria must be realistic, objectively measurable, documented and
aligned with what "quality" and "success" mean to your customers. This article provides
many examples of how (and how not) to write effective release criteria.
"15 Tips for Outsourced Software Development Success."
Too many outsourced software development project wind up in litigation. The root causes of the project failure
and resulting legal conflict are often related to the project's requirements, to communication issues,
or to the project management approaches used
(or not used). This article presents 15 recommendations for keeping your outsourced project on track and out
of court. A checklist helps you perform a health check on your project, to see if it's heading for trouble.
"Standing on Principle." Adapted from Creating a Software Engineering
Culture, this article gives many examples of high-integrity and high-intelligence interactions among managers, developers, and customers.
"Creating a Software Engineering Culture." This article describes several cultural principles
about software engineering that I think are important. These principles imply
certain technical practices and managerial behaviors that are conducive to
creating an environment focused on software quality through effective processes.
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Peer Reviews
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"Seven Truths About Peer Reviews."
This article highlights seven important facts about peer reviews: peer reviews can take many forms;
inspections are a software industry best practice; there is no one true inspection method; peer reviews
complement testing; peer reviews are both technical and social activities; managers can make or break
a review program; and a peer review program doesn't run itself.
"Do Your Inspections Work?" This is a condensed
overview of three ways to measure results from your inspections: efficiency,
effectiveness, and return on investment. It describes several data items that you can easily collect
from your inspections and some simple metrics to calculate from those data items. Inspections provide
an easy way to begin a quality metrics program.
"Humanizing Peer Reviews."
Peer reviews are at least as much a social interaction as a technical exchange. This article addresses
some of the social and cultural aspects of peer reviews, including ways to overcome resistance
to the process, benefits that reviews provide for various team members, the role of management, and 10 signs of management
commitment to the review process.
"When Two Eyes Aren't Enough." Several different types of activities called
"peer reviews" are described here, including inspections, team reviews, walkthroughs, pair programming,
peer deskchecks, and passarounds. A table suggests which types of peer reviews are best suited for
achieving specific review objectives.
"When Reviewers Can't Meet." When participants in a peer
review cannot meet face-to-face, you need to use distributed or asynchronous review techniques.
This article describes several ways to deal with reviewers who are separated by space or time.
"The Seven Deadly Sins of Software Reviews." This article describes 7 common
ways that technical reviews go wrong. Symptoms of the problem, and suggestions
for getting the review back on track are also presented.
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Copyright © 2023 Karl Wiegers. All rights reserved.
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