Book Review: Software Requirements Memory Jogger
A Pocket Guide to Help Software and Business Team Develop and Manage Requirements

Ellen Gottesdiener
Goal/QPC, 2005
 

ISBN 1576810607 (3.5" X 5.5" wiro-bound booklet)

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Anyone who knows Ellen Gottesdiener's Requirements by Collaboration will immediately guess that this will be a fine introduction to the field. They won't be disappointed either. The diminutive format of the book, or 'booklet' as the publishers have it, looks unpromising from the outside, suggesting a sketchy industrial 'Spreadsheets for Dimwits' sort of approach. But the book's content is anything but that.

Gottesdiener has written a textbook covering the whole requirements process, including at the largest scale the kind of life-cycle to choose for your project, and at smaller scales how to gather, write, and review requirements. Somehow she has packed in a wealth of materials, suggestions, checklists and modelling techniques. The knowledge is encyclopaedic, the space small: like Dr Who's Tardis time-machine, it is much bigger on the inside than on the outside. It's extremely practical, too.

Most of the material is applicable to projects of all kinds, not only software. The book should appeal to a wide audience, with or without requirements experience. It is clearly aimed at people in the software industry but may well be useful to students of software engineering as well.

© Ian Alexander 2006