Software and Systems Requirements Engineering In Practice Book Review

This little book is packed with sound advice. Pros- The book covers a wide variety of topics and does so at a detailed enough level that you have a good understanding of the topic. They do not waste time on filler content. It covers building a requirement’s taxonomy, eliciting requirements, Model-Driven Requirements Engineering, quality attributes, the importance of architecture, engineering platforms, requirements management, requirements-driven testing, rapid development techniques, hazard and threat analysis, distributed requirements engineering, and creating a requirements database. As the book covers all these topics the authors made really great use of visualizing the material with really great diagrams. They cover a lot of best practices and offer really sound advice. The tips on developing uses cases are great. Each chapter comes with an extensive reference section. Cons- The publisher should have made the book a bit larger. The diagrams included in the book are some of the best I have seen, but they are very small. They could have made electronic versions available online (I guess I could blow them up on a copier). The book was definitely written by people hanging out in the engineering world because they use a ton of acronyms and they are not always easy to figure out. They did not include all of them in the index. I found it a little annoying that some of the key concepts/tools point to internal Siemens tools like the DesignAdvisor and URML (Unified Requirements Modeling Language). All in all I highly recommend this book. Its size allows me to carry it around with my laptop. I have been taking it everywhere for weeks now and every time I think of shelving it at work or at home I choose not to so I can review one or more of the sections one last time. If you are involved in software development at all (developer, user, project manager, architect, tester, etc.) this is required reading.