20 Best Practices for Developing and Managing Requirements on Any Project

Software Requirements Essentials presents 20 core practices for successful project and requirements elicitation, analysis, specification, validation, and management. Leading requirements experts Kurt Wiegers and Candase Hokanson focus on the practices most likely to deliver superior value in both traditional and agile projects, in any application domain. These core practices help teams understand business problems, engage the right participants, articulate better solutions, improve communication, implement the best functionality in the right sequence, and adapt to change and growth.

Concise and tightly focused, this book offers just enough pragmatic "how-to" detail for you to apply the core practices with confidence, whether you're an analyst, engineer, product manager, product owner, or developer. Using it, your entire team can build a shared understanding of key concepts, terminology, techniques, and rationales--and work together more effectively on every project.

• Clarify problems, define business objectives, and set boundaries
• Identify stakeholders and empower decision-makers
• Describe user tasks, events, and responses
• Assess data concepts, relationships, and quality attributes
• Analyze requirements and requirement sets, create models and prototypes, and set priorities
• Specify requirements in a consistent, structured, well-documented fashion
• Review, test, and manage change to requirements

"I once read the ten best-selling requirements engineering books of the prior ten years. This one book succinctly presents more useful information than those ten books combined."
--Mike Cohn, author of User Stories Applied and co-founder, Scrum Alliance

Karl Wiegers is Principal Consultant with Process Impact, a software development consulting and training company in Happy Valley, Oregon. Previously, he spent eighteen years at Kodak, where he held positions as a photographic research scientist, software developer, software manager, and software process and quality improvement leader. Karl received a PhD in organic chemistry from the University of Illinois. Karl is the author of twelve previous books and has written many articles on software development, management, design, consulting, chemistry, and military history. Karl has served on the editorial board for IEEE Software magazine and as a contributing editor for Software Development magazine. He is the author of Software Development Pearls (Addison-Wesley, 2022).

Candase Hokanson is a Business Architect and PMI-Agile Certified Practitioner at ArgonDigital, a software development, professional services, and training company based in Austin, Texas. Candase graduated from Rice University with a BS and MS in civil engineering and a BA in religious studies. She is an active member of the product and business analysis communities, previously serving as a co-chair for the Keep Austin Agile conference in 2019 and president of the Austin IIBA. She has authored multiple articles on using visual models in agile, requirements in agile, and agile in the large enterprise.

Foreword
Acknowledgments
About the Authors

Chapter 1: Essentials of Software Requirements
Chapter 2: Laying the Foundation
Chapter 3: Requirements Elicitation
Chapter 4: Requirements Analysis
Chapter 5: Requirements Specification
Chapter 6: Requirements Validation
Chapter 7: Requirements Management
Appendix: Summary of Practices

References
Index