Exploring Requirements: Quality Before Design

Rating:
Summary: Required Reading: Gause & Weinberg teach how to ask and get
Review: "So, what do you want it to do?"

It looks like such a simple question. But this query - posed every day about Web sites, other software, indeed about buildings and cars and furniture and all sorts of designed objects - is one of the toughest questions that can be asked of an organisation. It triggers the requirements process. A thirteen-year-old book by Donald Gause and Gerald Weinberg, "Exploring Requirements" shows how to manage that process. Most Web developers and managers haven't read it, and should.

Like the man startled to find he had been speaking prose all his life, most of us have taken part in a requirements process, and many of us don't know it. Requirements analysis is actually a life skill that can be applied particularly often in your working life. If you've had an architect design renovations, or a friend build you a PC, or a large consulting firm build you a business reporting system, then you've been on the end of a requirement process, formal or informal. If you've ever designed or built something, and seen a disappointed look on the recipient's face, you've experienced requirements failure. If you've ever had a client rave about how great a Web site is, you've achieved requirements success.

Like that other classic, DeMarco and Lister's "Peopleware", "Exploring Requirements" makes ample use of large numbers of measurements collected over many years - like the numbers showing that programers are quite good at producing what they are actually asked to produce, if only they are asked to produce it. This data allows Gause and Weinberg to enunciate a simple principle: you'll quite likely get what you want, as long as you say what it is.

Saying what you want, though, takes surprising amounts of both discipline and technique. It requires people to think about their own needs in a ruthlessly structured way, to listen to others' needs, to understand how their business is now and imagine what it could be in five years' time. No wonder that success in IT-related requirements processes is rare, and that failure is the norm.

The continued popularity of "Exploring Requirements" springs partly from its authors' simple but thorough style: they explain the key challenges concisely and clearly. Their breadth helps too: their chapters cover everything from holding effective meetings to scoring client preferences to measuring ambiguity. Context also plays a role: Gause and Weinberg always explain why their preferred solutions work better.

And the book shows a sense of fun, notably in its periodic anecdotes about fictional and slightly dysfunctional requirements processes for a pair of products called Superchalk and Do Not Disturb.

But the enduring strength of Gause and Weinberg's book can only be fully explained by their willingness to talk about requirements at an emotional level - about what a tough, confronting, challenging task it is for so many of the people involved, and about the perils and delights of having one person understand what another person is thinking, hoping and sometimes hiding even from themselves. Mindreading is tough, and Gause and Weinberg aren't afraid to admit it.

For instance, Gause and Weinberg include an entire chapter on setting expectations, teaching designers to identify the possible and the impossible early so as to minimise a client's disappointments.

Their last substantive sentence demonstrates perhaps most clearly their focus on the emotional challenge of requirements work:

"The purpose of requirements work is to avoid making mistakes, and to do a complete job. In the end, however, you can't avoid all mistakes, and you can't be omniscient. If you can't risk being wrong, if you can't risk being inadequate to the task you've taken on, you will never succeed in requirements work. If you want the reward, you will have to take the risk."

Understanding other people is hard - hard enough to justify reading 300 well-written pages about it. These are the 300 pages to read.

Rating:
Summary: Essential Reading
Review: By no means have I read everything there is to read on the subject of software requirements, but I've not read anything better than this book. What I really like about this book, and about Weinberg's writings in general, is that it does not get bogged down in a bunch of academic methodology mumbo jumbo. Gause and Weinberg's approach is imminently practical and free of buzzwords and complicated steps and models and CASE tools. No special equipment or licensing is required in order to take the advice in this book and make a huge difference in your current and future projects.

That said, do not let me give the impression that this book is vague or that it does not get into specifics or that it does not contain some useful step-by-step approaches. It is not vague at all, and it gets into plenty of specifics. What impresses me the most is the way it achieves complete coverage of the subject without bogging down or becoming boring. After reading this book, it is very likely that you will not feel the need to read much else on the subject of software requirements.

Now, what is most amazing is this: this is *not* specifically a book about *software* requirements. It is about any kind of requirements for any kind of project that requires a design, be it a new and better mousetrap or a large software system. My comments have used the term "software requirements" because this is why I read the book, and why I think a lot of people will read it. But this book is for anyone who must specify the requirements for something that must be designed and/or built, no matter what field you are in. The lessons here are so univeral that it does not matter which context you use them in. Essential reading.

Rating:
Summary: A "must read" book for anyone who designs systems
Review: In a world where there is strong emphasis on project management skills and design skills, this is a welcome book that emphasizes that requirements must come first. The process of defining requirements is vital to success and, with good requirements, quality is assured. I recommend this book to anyone who works on solving problems or in building systems of any kind. Gause and Weinberg are excellent in presenting complex concepts in an entertaining and informative way.

There is a human tendency to want to rush into solutions as soon as an opportunity surfaces. And... the result is usually not what was needed. Then, there is a rush to "add quality" to the result by fixing the flaws. This is costly and often fatal to the project. This book takes the reader down a different road. A road of first defining the objective that is to be attained and being sure that all parties understand and agree to the requirements. If you only have a few books in your business library, this should be one of them. I shared my copy with so many colleagues that I finally had to buy another copy.

Rating:
Summary: Should be 6 stars!
Review: Like Weingerg's other books (and I have read them all -- most more than once), "Exploring Requirements" is about human nature, the way we react as individual beings to problems we encounter. Anyone looking for a canned methodology or "step-by-step" process to enable a system definition or design may be disappointed. But anyone who reads this will never react to any type of communication the same way again.

This is definitely not a technical book, nor even an IT book. It should be required reading for anyone whose job involves communication -- and that's just about everyone in business today. I have recommended it to all my managers and direct reports over the years since it was first published. I have also recommended it to trainers in public speaking and executive presentation skills. The writers' style is at once entertaining and instructive. Unless you are looking for a "cookbook," you won't be disappointed.

Rating:
Summary: Quality Requirements by Design
Review: The authors define development as the process of transforming someone's desires into a product that satisfies those desires. Their book deals with the early stages of the process.

It is easy, they say, if readers focus on five critical words: desire, product, people, attempt and discover.

Then why is it, to borrow statistics used by Microsoft at their Project 2002 product that 74 per cent of projects in the United States are either behind schedule or fail at a cost to industry of $74 Billion a year?

If you watch how people successfully develop systems, the authors say, you will observe that the process of developing requirements is a process of developing a team who:

1.Understand the requirements.
2.Stay together to work on the project.
3.Understand and practice teamwork.

The project, the authors say, will probably fail if one of these conditions is not met. Team members must develop and concentrate on three critical, but often ignored human aspects of the process:

1.A clear understanding of the requirements by all members
2.A sense of teamwork
3.The required skills and tools to work effectively as a team.

This conversational book is written to be read in modules or front to back. Either way, the exercises and tools provided should help rank your project with the successful 26 per cent.

Rating:
Summary: A classic now and destined to be a classic in the future
Review: This book is a refreshing approach to eliciting and analyzing requirements and has completely changed my thinking. What I like about it (and how it influenced me the most) is the human-approach that accounts for how we illogical creatures perceive, think and react. The authors use humor to lure us into a logical way of seeing the world and applying critical thought and a good dose of reasoning to the process. For the first time I was able to clearly see how difficult it is to effectively communicate, which is key to eliciting requirements, and how perceptions need to be managed. The anecdotes scattered throughout this book made it lively reading (rare for a "technical" book), and the skillful writing and well thought out structure of the book leads you into regions of thought and thinking where one rarely ventures on their own.

With 25 years of IT experience, and countless frustrating cycles of eliciting what I thought were firm requirements only to discover that there were still disconnects, I can only say I wish I had read this book years ago. However, better late than never. I recommend that anyone involved with eliciting or analyzing requirements read this book. It will almost certainly change your approach, and will definitely teach you a thing or two about human nature. I agree with a previous reviewer in that this book will be as valid a decade from now as it is today and the decade ago that it was first written.