Optimize Your Entire Requirements Process–and Use Requirements to Build More Successful Software

Using IBM® Rational® RequisitePro®, you can systematically improve the way you create and maintain requirements–and use those requirements to build more effective, higher-quality software. Now, for the first time, there’s a comprehensive, hands-on guide to optimally using RequisitePro in real-world development environments.

Utilizing a start-to-finish sample project, requirements expert Peter Zielczynski introduces an organized, best-practice approach to managing requirements and shows how to implement every step with RequisitePro. You’ll walk through planning, eliciting, and clarifying stakeholder requirements; building use cases and other key project documents; managing changing requirements; transforming requirements into designs; and much more. Every stage of the process is illuminated with examples, realistic artifacts, and practical solutions.

This book is an invaluable resource for everyone who creates requirements, and everyone who relies on them: business analysts, systems analysts, project managers, architects, designers, developers, and testers alike.

Coverage includes

• Overcoming the three leading causes of project failure: lack of user input, incomplete requirements and specifications, and poorly managed change
• Understanding each type of software requirement–how they interrelate, and what makes a good requirement
• Establishing a Requirements Management Plan that describes how requirements are created and handled throughout the project lifecycle
• Developing a Vision document that can drive your project from beginning to end
• Creating high-quality use cases
• Using requirements as the basis for system design
• Leveraging RequisitePro features for improved project management
• Integrating requirements management with the IBM Rational Unified Process®

Foreword xvii

Preface xix

Acknowledgments xxiii

About the Author xxv

Part I: Overview 1

Chapter 1: Requirements Management 3

Chapter 2: Overview of RequisitePro 23

Part II: Requirements Management Activities 33

Chapter 3: Establishing a Requirements Management Plan 35

Chapter 4: Setting up the Project 45                            

Chapter 5: Requirements Elicitation 63

Chapter 6: Developing a Vision Document 99

Chapter 7: Creating Use Cases 129             

Chapter 8: Supplementary Specification 157  

Chapter 9: Creating Test Cases from Use Cases 191       

Chapter 10: Creating Test Cases from Supplementary Requirements 221       

Chapter 11: Object-Oriented Design 243

Chapter 12: Documentation 273

Part III: Other Topics 285

Chapter 13: Managing Projects 287

Chapter 14: Requirements Management in the Rational Unified Process 295

Part IV: Review 311

Chapter 15: Summary 313

Appendix: Sample Requirements Management Plan 319

Index 327

 

About The Author

Peter Zielczynski has 25 years of experience in information technology. He holds a Ph.D. degree in computer science from the Technical University of Warsaw. He has published more than ten articles in technical journals and has made several presentations at international conferences, including the Rational Users Conference. Peter worked at Cyfronet developing expert systems, and then as a consultant for such clients as IBM, Merrill Lynch, Ernst & Young, and AIG. He was cofounder and CEO of a consulting company, International Object Technology, which was eventually acquired by a publicly traded company, The A Consulting Team (currently Helios & Matheson North America). Peter specializes in Requirements Management, Object-Oriented Analysis and Design, and Project Management and has been using Rational tools since 1994.