Visual requirements models are one of the most effective ways to identify software
requirements. They help the analyst to ensure that all stakeholders—including
subject matter experts, business stakeholders, executives, and technical teams—understand
the proposed solution. Visualization keeps stakeholders interested and engaged,
which is key to finding gaps in the requirements. Most importantly, visualization creates
a picture of the solution that helps stakeholders understand what the solution will and
will not deliver. Despite this fact, many business analysts and product managers continue
to create nonvisual requirements using spreadsheets or documents listing thousands
of line items. These unwieldy documents are overwhelming, boring to review, and
extremely
difficult to analyze for missing requirements. Such practices are a symptom
of the state of current requirements training, which is often focused on how to write a
good requirement rather than how to analyze an entire solution.
This book will help business analysts, product managers, and others in their organizations
use visual models to elicit, model, and understand requirements. It describes a
simple but comprehensive language of visual models for software requirements called
RML (Requirements Modeling Language) that is a collection of best-practice models
that have commonly been used in industry in an ad-hoc fashion.
Apply best practices for capturing, analyzing, and implementing software requirements through visual models—and deliver better results for your business. The authors—experts in eliciting and visualizing requirements—walk you through a simple but comprehensive language of visual models that has been used on hundreds of real-world, large-scale projects. Build your fluency with core concepts—and gain essential, scenario-based context and implementation advice—as you progress through each chapter.
-
Transcend the limitations of text-based requirements data using visual models that more rigorously identify, capture, and validate requirements
-
Get real-world guidance on best ways to use visual models—how and when, and ways to combine them for best project outcomes
-
Practice the book’s concepts as you work through chapters
-
Change your focus from writing a good requirement to ensuring a complete system
