Software Requirements (Developer Best Practices)

What I love about this book is that it is so easy to pick this up, get several great ideas on how to fix whatever kind of problem you are facing in software development, and then use those ideas to implement something today that is really going to make a difference in what you can deliver to your customers. Wiegers and Beatty give pragmatic examples and "oops" stories on everything from Agile and analytics through real-time embedded systems that demonstrate the key points you need to know to make your project successful. The book also includes templates, tips, and project-specific details to help you use what you learn. I have used the second edition of this book to help me work with software teams on problems ranging from reducing defects and increasing consulting revenue through implementing industry-standard requirements such as PCI. The third edition of the book builds on the second by increasing its coverage on topics such as dashboard reporting, data requirements, and data modeling. The book is meant to be read cover-to-cover but you can still get a lot out of it by reading what you need, as you need it. My favorite section in this third edition is the expanded discussion on quality attributes. This is an area that is so often overlooked in software development because we tend to assume the best and forget to plan for the worst. This section explains the different types of quality controls and how to know which ones to use based on the type of project you are working on. The authors do a great job throughout the book in explaining how to gracefully handle software errors to keep your data, users, and possibly your customers safe from harm.

Although The Business Analysis Body of Knowledge (a.k.a BABoK) is now considered the bible of the business analysis worldwide, I can argue that Karl Wiegers’ “Software Requirements v3” should be dubbed as the survival guide for earnest IT Business Analysts. The BABoK has been written by different authors to be a comprehensive and horizontal framework on the subject, and I can say that its third version is much handy than the older one in terms of the logical soundness of the BA practice. However, Wiegers’ “Software Requirements” is the real practical and actionable book on “The Art of Requirements Engineering”. It is not a UML course or how-to, but rather a notation-agnostic complete trove of tips and advice that we need –as business analysts- to master in order to promote the BA profession beyond the mere current activities of hasty requirements collection and -then- mindless superficial dull documentation. Karl brought back deliberation and profoundness into this craft.

Delivery was very prompt and book arrived in great condition. In terms of value for money this book is very good. Much cheaper than many of the other text books I've had to buy for Uni. It's very readable with lots of good examples and I like the "case study" which is worked into the chapters. My main criticism of this book is more about the subject than the book though. Requirements Elicitation is obviously an enormously important subject and yet it's also one of those subjects whose basic tenets are so blindingly obvious that they don't really need an entire book to explain them. So to fill out the book much material gets repeated and the points labored too much. I found that I kept "drifting off" and thinking about other things whilst reading only to find I'd missed some important point. Anyway It's the best text I've found on this subject so it still comes highly recommended.

There are many very good books about requirements. This book is in a hurry. It wastes no time. It is on a mission to bring you information you can immediately use. I have struggled with requirements, in writing them, and in improving them across the organization. This book gives the reader practical advice on finding, writing, and managing requirements for software projects. Other books I read, glean what I can, and put them away. This book I keep on hand, not as a prescriptive source, but as a guide, a mentor's view. This book will get the reader past thinking about requirements to managing them.

Poor requirements is often cited as the number one cause of reduced quality and efficiency within an organization. This has also been my experience. Time to take the matter in your own hands. This is a solid book on requirements development and management that has helped navigate me and my team within a waterfall/iterative organization during our transition to more agile approaches. This book provides many tools and insightful data to help structure and model software requirements and, to some degree, software architectures. I would consider this a classic and would recommend it to anyone who wants to improve their business engineering skills.

This book was a great purchase. Sometimes I get stuck writing requirements and this book has totally enhanced my software requirements. My manager and developers have noticed a difference in my requirements. My manager has also purchased this book based off my usage.

I bought this book to help me understand the processes involved in software life-cycles. I would say this book ranks at the very top of my list of most important reads (along with a few others). Very informative for a person who is starting a business or attempting to develop larger applications.

This is the standard work on the subject, and it is still comprehensive and still relevant. The writing is better so far than the previous edition, which was thorough, but tough sledding when it came to reading more than about 20 pages at a whack. This edition is much more pleasant to read, or that is my initial impression.