The TL;DR for a 640-page book on software requirements — Authors sometimes make things longer and more complicated than necessary. Some readers might feel that I’ve been guilty of this myself. The third edition of my book Software Requirements, co-authored with Joy Beatty, is about 245,000 words long, nearly 640 pages in a rather small font. …

Before you adopt the hottest new development method as a magic bullet, find out why you aren’t already getting the results you seek. — I have never met anyone who could honestly say “I am building software today as well as software could ever be built.” Individuals, teams, and organizations should all be continually looking for better ways to do our work. Frustration with disappointing results is a powerful motivation for trying a different…

A focus on understanding users and their usage is the best key to success — I first learned to program computers in college in 1970. Since then, I’ve performed many roles in software engineering: coder, designer, business analyst (BA), tester, project manager, documentation writer, team manager, process improvement leader, consultant, trainer, and author. Plus, of course, like all of us, I’m a user.

Absorb knowledge from other people’s experiences instead of slowly climbing every painful learning curve yourself — Anyone who cannot truthfully say, “I am building software today as well as software could ever be built,” would benefit from learning better ways to work. Experience is the form of learning that sticks with us the best. It’s also the slowest and most painful way to learn. …

Here are 10 valuable techniques for analyzing individual requirements and 8 more for analyzing sets of requirements. — A surprising number of books on software requirements don’t even have an index entry for requirements analysis. Without more specifics, analysis sounds like something that just kind of happens through staring at requirements long enough. In reality, you can use several techniques to search for specific issues and produce better…

Active risk management is an essential component of managing any project. — A company once engaged me to determine why a major multinational software development project had failed. As I studied the project records, I discovered that the team had maintained a list of project risks — a solid project management practice. However, their monthly status reports showed only the same two…

How data requirements and data analysis impact project success — The computing business used to be called “data processing” for a reason: all software applications create, consume, manipulate, or delete data. We can think of data as the glue that connects all the other requirement types; alternatively, functionality exists to process data. Both perspectives underscore the importance of exploring data…

If your software team doesn’t address the right problem, they might experience project success but product failure. — Imagine that you worked for more than a year on a project that had executive support and high visibility. In your business analyst role, you performed the requirements elicitation, analysis, and specification. The development team built what the stakeholders asked for and deployed the product on schedule. But just three…

Real-time systems present some specific requirements issues — Most discussions about software requirements deal with business information systems, phone apps, and similar projects. The world is also full of products that use software to control hardware devices, including both embedded and host-based systems. …