Effective Requirements Practices

By Ralph R. Young

Book Overview

--Roger Pressman Requirements analysis and management is finally receiving the attention it deserves as a key factor in the success of systems and software development projects. And with this new... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0201709120
• ISBN13: 9780201709124
• Release Date: March 2001
• Publisher: Addison-Wesley Professional
• Length: 400 Pages
• Weight: 1.50 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.9" x 7.5" x 9.1"

Customer Reviews

A "Must-Have" for a Requirements Library

I have a different perspective on Dr. Young's book than many engineers. I am actually a technical writer who specializes in writing requirements. I also have a teaching background. Effective Requirements Practices is a very well written book that effectively teaches you about the entire requirements process. Some features that I liked about Dr. Young's book are:WELL WRITTEN STYLE. He defines his vocabulary and uses simple clear language. He summarizes important information into charts, checklists, flowcharts, and bulleted lists. He follows a logical outline so I can locate the specific chapter I need quickly.APPLICABLE ADVICE. I liked the criteria of a good requirement. It gave me specific questions I could ask to see if the requirement was good.PROCESS OVERVIEW. This book helped me understand other's roles in the requirements process so I could work better as a team.EXPANDABLE RESOURCES. He gives informative summaries of applicable websites, papers, or books. I can expand to other resources when I need to research a specific topic.CURRENT RESEARCH. Dr. Young gives great dollars-and-cents examples of why we need effective requirements practices. This has helped sell the requirements process to management.INFORMATION CD. The CD contains templates, checklists, vocabulary, and visuals that you can use to help establish your requirements practice.Whether you are going to focus on a few chapters or the entire book, Effective Requirements Practices is a "must-have" if you work with requirements.

Great Overview of Best Ideas for Managing Requirements.

This book is a rich up to date source of the best thinking and practicesregarding requirements. It is a systems engineering book, and is rich in themotivation/organization/process aspects of dealing with requirementsthroughout the life cycle. I especially appreciated the rich pointers toeasily accessible websites for referenced material. The author has personalcontact with the best people in the business, and has managed to collatetheir experience and advice with his own large scale experiences. This isnot a book on specific methods for expressing requirements. It is amanager's book. When my son said "Dad I only want you to recommend the bestof what you read", I handed him my copy.

Old Project Manager Learning New Tricks (Tools)

After 30 years of project management experience including managing project managers, I thought I knew it all. This book has allowed me to better understand some of the processes I have been using for years and provided several new (to me) requirements analysis tools. I am now using Effective Requirements Practices as a reference tool in my current projects.I am currently mentoring a couple of project managers. Because the requirements process is the keystone of all projects and the practices provided in this book are so well presented I bought additional copies for their reference libraries.A pretty quick read and very informative.

Guidance from a True Practioner

Dr. Ralph Young has produced a book from a practitioners standpoint. Dr. Young has spent many years working in the world of systems and software engineering and for the last ten years has put great emphasis on requirements. He has developed and refined a process for emerging the real requirements based on research and actual practice. The detailed process flows are those developed by a team of requirements specialists and used repeatedly by Litton PRC to achieve CMM Level 5. You may not be ready to step into all of this on day one, but you will have a road map to follow as you increase your organization's maturity level. Why start at ground level when you can stand on the shoulders of a proven process that is described in detail in this book? In addition to providing recommendations for best practices, Dr. Young gives the reader a nineteen page bibliography of almost everything written on the subject of requirements. This up-to-date list including many books from 2000, combined with Key References and Suggested Reading for each chapter, will give you the best cross-reference library you can find anywhere and he even provides this on a CD-ROM.

If you develop systems, keep this on your desk!

As a software engineer, I found Dr. Young's book to be practical and very useful. My project has been implementing six of his ten "Recommended Requirements Practices," and they have indeed proved to be effective, as advertised. The book is organized around the 10 requirements practices, but covers a very wide range of other issues that influence project success - including such diverse topics as project management, team partnering, process definition, and project communication. The book and accompanying CD are loaded with templates and examples; we've reused a couple of them to produce deliverables for our customers. The book doesn't have lots of "textbook" things like review problems and quizzes; it's much more focused on real-world implementation than some other requirements books (like the ones that are obviously the collected notes from some professor's undergraduate class). There is a glossary, and two good indexes (by author and by subject) that are accurate and at the right level of detail to make the book effective as a reference. The other thing that has kept this book on my ready-reference shelf is the annotated bibliographies - each chapter ends with a list of key references (mostly books and articles), with explanations of why they are significant, what they contain, and URLs for the ones that are available on the web.