Telling Stories: A Short Path to Writing Better Software Requirements

Introduction

This book is about writing clear and compelling software requirements documents. It is not a comprehensive guide to managing requirements through the entire software development process. I focus narrowly on writing the requirements document because I believe this vital step has not been well explained. Aside from writing the document, I describe a few basic approaches to planning the requirements process and building the team you'll need to succeed, and I suggest a few strategies for working with the team as you go along. Many excellent books go into these topics in more detail. I will refer to them as I go along.

Many books help you build important skills for the requirements management process. Most are written by analysts, developers, project managers, and consultants, not writers. These books have a bias toward robust requirements processes for large projects executed by full-time analysts. In establishing credibility for these processes and the requirements-analyst profession, the authors sometimes make writing requirements seem very scientific and complex. Some authors are quite successful in describing how to discover and analyze requirements in great detail for engineering purposes. But these engineer-focused processes are often so specialized that nontechnical readers cannot follow them or understand the results. Often the outputs are a multimedia hodgepodge of storyboards, diagrams, spreadsheets, and presentations that are not clear to anyone who did not create ...