Requirements by Collaboration

A good book is one that gives me a few ideas that help me do my job better. A great book is one that I find myself turning to over and over.I can tell that this is a great book because my copy is getting worn out. I've learned more from it than anything else I've read in the last several years about software requirements and I continue to refer to it. Sometimes I find a particular technique to help with the task at hand, and sometimes I reread a section in light of my recent experience on a project and learn something more subtle.Even if you aren't using the facilitated workshop approach to requirements, this book is still very useful. I refer over and over to its collection of different requirements models and how they relate to one another. There are other books that give a much more thorough treatment of a particular tool (Cockburn's Applying Use Cases for example) but none I've seen that tie it all together so well and help you pick the right analysis tools for the job.If you like this book, be sure to visit Ellen's web site, www.ebgconsulting.com. The Resources section has many checklists and templates that go beyond the material in the book and can save you a lot of time when preparing a requirements workshop.I'm surprised that only eight people (as of December 2003) have read and reviewed this. It's way better than that.

This is a must read for anyone trying to create a collaborative project management environment. The website support was exceptional and the description of workshop tools, concepts and approaches should help any project team (technology or other) stay focused on the customer and the business requirements. I used it very successfully to teach a Project Management class for Technology Management MBA students and found it to be very crucial for the study and practice of collaborative work efforts. Practitioners might also consider formal facilitation training to assure success. (David Spann, MBA Director, Westminster College, Utah & Assessor for the IAF Professional Facilitator Certificate, 801-832-2655.)

Software development is approximately 50 percent about computing and 50 percent about communication. "Requirements by Collaboration" deals with the critical communication half of the problem. Ellen Gottesdiener presents a wealth of practical tools and techniques for facilitating collaborative requirements development workshops. The goal of such workshops is to arrive at a common vision of the product being specified, which gives all stakeholders confidence in achieving a successful project outcome.This is a highly pragmatic book, not a theoretical treatise. Ellen describes in clear detail the nuts and bolts of planning and leading requirements workshops. Chapters address the Purpose, Participants, Principles, Products, Place, and Process of such workshops. Based on her extensive hands-on experience as a facilitator, Ellen presents several illustrative case studies and many tips that share her insights. These methods are broadly applicable to any type of facilitation, not just software requirements exploration.Ellen describes some 20 different requirements models, organized ways to represent the diverse jumble of information that appears whenever people discuss their needs and the desired properties of a new product. These models provide a richness of representation that goes far beyond the list of functional requirements or even use cases that traditionally comes out of requirements workshops.I especially like Ellen's collaboration patterns, with intriguing titles such as "Decide How to Decide," "Expand Then Contract," "The Sieve," and "Wall of Wonder." These describe recurring patterns of interaction among the members of a collaborative team. Skillful application of selected collaboration patterns can help any group achieve its objectives efficiently and with less friction than they might otherwise suffer."Requirements by Collaboration" is essential reading for all requirements workshop leaders. It will help both technical people and customer representatives participate effectively in these critical contributors to software success.

Gottesdiener's down-to-earth writing style combined with her extensive knowledge of requirements gathering make Requirements by Collaboration a must-have book for Product and Project Managers, Technology Leads, Business Analysts and Information Architects.Gottesdiener employs engaging side-bars, useful figures, and a bounty of experience to explain the complex process of eliciting and describing user needs. Her infusion of quiet wisdom with extensive workshop exercises and tools energizes the reader in planning their own projects.She has designed the workshops and exercises in such a way that they can easily apply to traditional software applications, web applications or even a pure content project that addresses a diverse audience. Her narrative examples as well as the case studies effectively transfer the concepts into something tangible. Gottesdiener's years of software development experience coupled with her straight-forward writing style make her book a perfect choice for either a senior developer or a mid-level project manager. In addition to her technical experience, her knowledge of group dynamics round out the book by educating the reader on how to manage conflict and personality differences within a requirements team - something that is missing from most requirements textbooks.Software and web development teams can quickly and easily put Gottesdiener's book to practice. It's a required "handbook" that will be referred to again and again.

This ground breaking book blends the best of PD (Participatory Design), RD (Rapid Development) and JAD (joint application development). To this synthesis it adds modern elements such as business rules. To understand why this book is a ground breaking work a little history is in order. Participatory design (PD) began in England by Enid Mumford and was refined in Scandinavia by Pelle Ehn and Morten Kyng in the late 1970s. RD (Rapid Development) was first formalized by DuPont in mid 1980s and was then known as Rapid Iterative Production Prototyping (RIPP). JAD was first developed by Toby Crawford and Chuck Morris at IBM in 1977. Each of these approaches have one thing in common: participatory requirements elicitation accomplished in a workshop setting. Most previous work about these approaches focused on general aspects of workshop management and requirements. Although this book certainly addresses these two aspects, it goes beyond. This book is structured in three parts and 12 chapters. Part I covers the basics of constructing a workshop and provides a comprehensive list of deliverables. The author's web site that supports this book provides checklists and templates in Word and PDF format, which will save you time. The web site also has links to other resources that will prove extremely useful. Part II provides the workshop framework, covering logistics, managing roles and ground rules and the workshop process itself. Part III addresses the strategies for conducting the workshop. What I particularly like about this book are:(1) It defines a process with inputs, tasks and defined outputs (deliverables).(2) Adds structure by aligning business problems to model views, and by defining the deliverables that need to be produced to develop the model. The models views are: behavior, structural, dynamic and control. These cover the four basic business problem domains.(3)Does not lock you into any single model (you can use multiple model types), and provides criteria for selecting the best model(s) to employ for capturing requirements.(4) Introduces business rules, which is (in my opinion) one of the most powerful and effective means of capturing requirements.The approach set forth is effective and thoroughly modernizes the approaches that were synthesized. More importantly it provides a structure in which to conduct participatory workshops, and clearly defines the types of goals you should be setting based on the business problem, and clear definitions of the deliverables that the workshop should produce. This book goes into my short list of best books read in 2002, and I suspect it will remain on my short list of recommended books for years to come.