Customer-Centered Products: Creating Successful Products Through Smart Requirements Management

After wasting money buying business books that could have been summarized into three pages it was nice to read a book that was detailed, useful and minimized repetition. My only complaint is that it could have included a comprehensive sample requirement document as an appendix. I recommend this book to anyone interested in developing better products or services.

Ivy Hooks and Kristin Farry have succesfully captured the essence of effectively defining and managing a product definition. This book is an excellent view into the problems and difficulties of writing effective requirements, and solutions to help you write, organize, and manage your thoughts better. For those who are challenged with putting pen to paper, this book should help you step-around the pitfalls of improper requirements, and help you along the way by starting you off on the right foot.

This book will help managers save time, money, and schedule on development projects. It contains practical advice based on lessons learned on real projects. For example, data are provided that show that spending more effort on emerging the real requirements rather than simply using the customer's stated requirements can reduce costs by half! The authors recommend specific actions managers can take. They provide a set of useful checklists and suggestions for how to apply them. For example, what is the manager's role in developing good requirements? How can a project prioritize requirements so that resources are allocated consistently with real customer needs and expectations? How can important practices such as recording the rationale for each requirement, identifying and managing interfaces, and considering verification during requirements definition be implemented effectively? Hooks and Farry, both seasoned practitioners, have provided a valuable roadmap to help managers develop customer-centered products. The book is easy to read and the recommendations are easy to apply.

Good requirements are the foundation for good systems. Developing good requirements is frequently not easy. Fortunately, this book can really help. Hooks and Farry have created a very readable, well-organized book that focuses entirely on the requirements process. This book will be useful to anyone involved with the development of requirements for a complex system in almost any domain. It will be also very helpful to anyone who is seeking to improve the requirements definition process in an organization.

This book is an extremely useful guide to the difficult task of writing and managing requirements. It clearly states the case for spending the time and effort on producing a clear, concise requirements document, then steps you through the process. This book is especially great, because it is written with the manager in mind, to explain to them the why and how of requirements definition and management. If your customer or manager keeps asking you if you've started coding/building/manufacturing before you even know what it is you are making, then buy him this book!