Software Requirements

Introduction
Acknowledgements

Part 1: Software requirements: What, why, and who
1. The essential software requirement
-Software requirements defined
-Requirements development and management
-Every project has requirements
-When bad requirements happen to good people
-Benefits from a high-quality requirements process

2. Requirements from the customer's perspective
-The expectation gap
-Who is the customer?
-The customer-development partnership
-Creating a culture that respects requirements
-Identifying decision makers
-Reaching agreement on requirements

3. Good practices for requirements engineering
-A requirements development process framework
-Good practices: Requirements elicitation
-Good practices: Requirements analysis
-Good practices: Requirements specification
-Good practices: Requirements validation
-Good practices: Requirements management
-Good practices: Knowledge
-Good practices: Project management
-Getting started with new practices

4. The business analyst
-The business analyst role
-The business analyst's tasks
-Essential analyst skills
-Essential analyst knowledge
-The making of a business analyst
-The analyst role on agile projects
-Creating a collaborative team

Part 2: Requirements development
5. Establishing the business requirements
-Defining business requirements
-Vision and scope document
-Scope representation techniques
-Keeping the scope in focus
-Vision and scope on agile projects
-Using business objectives to determine completion

6. Finding the voice of the user
-User classes
-User personas
-Connecting with user representatives
-The product champion
-User representation on agile projects
-Resolving conflicting requirements

7. Requirements elicitation
-Requirements elicitation techniques
-Planning elicitation on your project
-Preparing for elicitation
-Performing elicitation activities
-Following up after elicitation
-Classifying customer input
-How do you know when you're done?
-Some cautions about elicitation
-Assumed and implied requirements
-Finding missing requirements

8. Understanding user requirements
-Use cases and user stories
-The use case approach
-Benefits of usage-centric requirements

9. Playing by the rules
-A business rules taxonomy
-Documenting business rules
-Discovering business rules
-Business rules and requirements
-Tying everything together

10. Documenting the requirements
-The software requirements specification
-A software requirements specification template
-Requirements specification on agile projects

11. Writing excellent requirements
-Characteristics of excellent requirements
-Guidelines for writing requirements
-Sample requirements, before and after

12. A picture is worth 1024 words
-Modeling the requirements
-From voice of the customer to analysis models
-Selecting the right representations
-Data flow diagram
-Swimlane diagram
-State-transition diagram and state table
-Dialog map
-Decision tables and decision trees
-Event-response tables
-A few words about UML diagrams
-Modeling on agile projects
-A final reminder

13. Specifying data requirements
-Modeling data relationships
-The data dictionary
-Data analysis
-Specifying reports
-Dashboard reporting

14. Beyond functionality
-Software quality attributes
-Exploring quality attributes
-Defining quality requirements
-Specifying quality requirements with Planguage
-Quality attribute trade-offs
-Implementing quality attribute requirements
-Constraints
-Handling quality attributes on agile projects

15. Risk reduction through prototyping
-Prototyping: What and why
-Mock-ups and proofs of concept
-Throwaway and evolutionary prototypes
-Paper and electronic prototypes
-Working with prototypes
-Prototype evaluation
-Risks of prototyping
-Prototyping success factors

16. First things first: Setting requirement priorities
-Why prioritize requirements?
-Some prioritization pragmatics
-Games people play with priorities
-Some prioritization techniques
-Prioritization based on value, cost, and risk

17. Validating the requirements
-Validation and verification
-Reviewing requirements
-Prototyping requirements
-Testing the requirements
-Validating requirements with acceptance criteria

18. Requirements reuse
-Why reuse requirements?
-Dimensions of requirements reuse
-Types of requirements information to reuse
-Common reuse scenarios
-Requirement patterns
-Tools to facilitate reuse
-Making requirements reusable
-Requirements reuse barriers and success factors

19. Beyond requirements development
-Estimating requirements effort
-From requirements to project plans
-From requirements to designs and code
-From requirements to tests
-From requirements to success

Part 3: Requirements for specific project classes
20. Agile projects
-Limitations of the waterfall
-The agile development approach
-Essential aspects of an agile approach to requirements
-Adapting requirements practices to agile projects
-Transitioning to agile: Now what?

21. Enhancement and replacement projects
-Expected challenges
-Requirements techniques when there is an existing system
-Prioritizing by using business objectives
-When old requirements don't exist
-Encouraging new system adoption
-Can we iterate?

22. Packaged solution projects
-Requirements for selecting packaged solutions
-Requirements for implementing packaged solutions
-Common challenges with packaged solutions

23. Outsourced projects
-Appropriate levels of requirements detail
-Acquirer-supplier interactions
-Change management
-Acceptance criteria

24. Business process automation projects
-Modeling business processes
-Modeling business performance metrics
-Good practices for business process automation projects

25. Business analytics projects
-Overview of business analytics projects
-Requirements development for business analytics projects
-The evolutionary nature of analytics

26. Embedded and other real-time systems projects
-System requirements, architecture, and allocation
-Modeling real-time systems
-Interfaces
-Timing requirements
-Quality attributes for embedded systems
-The challenges of embedded systems

Part 4: Requirements management
27. Requirements management practices
-Requirements management process
-The requirements baseline
-Requirements version control
-Requirement attributes
-Tracking requirements status
-Resolving requirements issues
-Measuring requirements effort
-Managing requirements on agile projects
-Why manage requirements?

28. Change happens
-Why manage changes?
-Managing scope creep
-Change control policy
-Basic concepts of the change control process
-A change control process description
-The change control board
-Change control tools
-Measuring change activity
-Change impact analysis
-Change management on agile projects

29. Links in the requirements chain
-Tracing requirements
-Motivations for tracing requirements
-The requirements traceability matrix
-Tools for requirements tracing
-A requirements tracing procedure
-Is requirements tracing feasible? Is it necessary?

30. Tools for requirements engineering
-Requirements development tools
-Requirements management tools
-Selecting and implementing a requirements tool

Part 5: Implementing requirements engineering
31. Improving your requirements processes
-How requirements relate to other project processes
-Requirements and various stakeholder groups
-Gaining commitment to change
-Fundamentals of software process improvement
-Root cause analysis
-The process improvement cycle
-Requirements engineering process assets
-Are we there yet?
-Creating a requirements process improvement road map

32. Software requirements and risk management
-Fundamentals of software risk management
-Requirements-related risks
-Risk management is your friend

Epilogue
Appendices
Glossary
References
Index