Effective Requirements Practices
Author: Ralph R. Young
Publisher: Addison-Wesley, 2001
359 pages
Amongst other material, Ralph Young quotes industry statistics about requirements based on thousands of projects. The fact that 80 percent of project defects may be attributed to the requirements process should make management and any self-respecting testers sit up!
Thirty percent of requirements are unnecessarily included into projects, 13 percent are omitted, and the remaining requirements contain 27 to 43 percent of the projects more standard defects!
Ralph Young has many helpful suggestions relating to requirements practices, and discusses these under chapter headings fitting to his proposed approach for getting and managing better quality requirements effectively.
The approach guidelines are:
- Commit to the (requirements) approach
- Establish and utilise a joint team responsible for the requirements
- Define the real customer needs
- Use and continually improve the requirements process
- Iterate the system requirements and architecture repeatedly
- Use a mechanism to maintain project communication
- Select familiar methods and maintain a set of work products
- Perform requirements verification and validation
- Provide an effective mechanism to accommodate requirements changes
- Perform the development effort using known familiar proven industry, organisational and project best practices
The book recommends an 8 to 14 percent investment in the requirements process and practices for significant positive returns.
The field of interest is huge with the author pointing to and discussing no less than 45 best practices (the bad news is that other authors and books have lists of best practices which add to the 45 practices mentioned!).
A recommended read, re-read, and re-read, until you and your company catch on. However, don't just read this book: find many other worthy reads in the extensively documented bibliography that Ralph Young provides.
Wayne Mallinson
What do other reviewers say:
- Old Project Manager learning new tricks
- Guidance from a true practitioner
- If you develop systems, keep this on your desk
- Top-notch addition to RM body of knowledge