The Complete Requirements Engineering Book

Too often the requirements effort on a project is driven by the current fad in software development without putting a sound foundation in place. Dr. Young's book is about building that foundation, a requirements engineering foundation built on sound engineering principles. As a requirements practitioner, I have many books on requirements engineering. Most of them are limited to specific tools, techniques, and the prejudices of their authors and most contain only a few chapters that are really useful. However, each chapter in the Requirements Engineering Handbook contains a wealth of information on what a successful requirements program looks like.

There are chapters that discuss the skills that a requirements analyst should have such as general skills useful to the analyst (or any engineer for that matter) and specialty skills such as modeling, inspections, and process improvement. There are chapters that discuss building the requirements program such as descriptions of the industry best practices for a sound requirements program and how quality improvement principles can be integrated with the requirements engineering processes. There are chapters that discuss the qualities of the requirements themselves such as descriptions of the requirement types and best of all guidance of how you can use these descriptions to ensure complete understanding of customer needs and expectations.

Each of the requirements books I own provides some useful information in a particular situation, but Dr. Young's Requirements Engineering Handbook is the only complete program building book on requirements engineering that I have seen. If I were charged with starting a new Requirements Engineering program somewhere and could take only one book with me; it would be The Requirements Engineering Handbook by Ralph R. Young.

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