Requirements Engineering: A Good Practice Guide

Defining what the customer wants is often a difficult aspect of creating successful software. However, Ian Sommerville and Pete Sawyer handle the topic with intelligence and depth in Requirements Engineering: A Good Practice Guide. The authors provide practical advice on how to make sure you deliver quality software that the customer wants and needs, all within budget.

The text first outlines what requirements engineering is and how it fits into the software engineering process. The authors then use a question-and-answer approach, short chapters, and highlighted tips to show how to define and develop a process for creating reliable software in your organization. Sommerville and Sawyer consider some ad hoc ways to improve your customer requirements documents and some more rigorous approaches, such as ISO 9000 standards for software engineering and formal specifications (where the correctness of software can be proved mathematically). Requirements Engineering can be a little dry, but it covers a vital area of software design that can benefit almost all developers.