Here are 74 books that Mastering the Requirements Process fans have personally recommended if you like
Mastering the Requirements Process.
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Defining and managing the requirements for a software system is hard! I’ve been interested in improving how projects handle their requirements for more than 35 years. I realized how important this was when I saw how many projects—including my own—struggled and failed when they neglected to build a solid foundation of well-understood and clearly communicated requirements. I’ve personally used nearly all of the techniques described in my book Software Requirements, and I got always better results when I applied those techniques. My books, articles, training courses, presentations, and videos on requirements have been helpful to thousands of business analysts worldwide for many years.
Exploring requirements is more about communication than computing. Requirements elicitation often involves discussions between business analysts and user representatives or other project stakeholders in either one-on-one discussions or group workshops. Requirements by Collaboration presents a wealth of practical tools and techniques for planning and leading requirements development workshops. It’s packed full of useful tips, checklists, questions to ask, and activities to perform to make workshops effective and successful.
I especially like Gottesdiener’s “collaboration patterns,” eight techniques that a workshop facilitator can employ to help the group achieve its objectives. The pattern called Decide How to Decide is the first one that any group of collaborators should use: exactly how will we make decisions? If you expect to lead, or even participate in, requirements workshops, read this book first.
"I spend much time helping organizations capture requirements and even more time helping them recover from not capturing requirements. Many of them have gone through some motions regarding requirements as if they were sleepworking. It's time to wake up and do it right-and this book is going to be their alarm clock."
- Jerry Weinberg, author of numerous books on productivity enhancement "In today's complex, fast-paced software development environment, collaboration-the intense peer-to-peer conversations that result in products, decisions, and knowledge sharing-is absolutely essential to success. But all too often, attempts to collaborate degenerate into agonizing meetings or ineffectual bull sessions.…
Defining and managing the requirements for a software system is hard! I’ve been interested in improving how projects handle their requirements for more than 35 years. I realized how important this was when I saw how many projects—including my own—struggled and failed when they neglected to build a solid foundation of well-understood and clearly communicated requirements. I’ve personally used nearly all of the techniques described in my book Software Requirements, and I got always better results when I applied those techniques. My books, articles, training courses, presentations, and videos on requirements have been helpful to thousands of business analysts worldwide for many years.
Most discussions about requirements focus on functionality, which is what the users most obviously observe in a software system. However, user satisfaction also depends heavily on nonfunctional requirements, such as various quality characteristics the system exhibits: usability, availability, reliability, security, scalability, maintainability, and others.
The Quest for Software Requirements is the only book that focuses on nonfunctional requirements. It provides many questions a business analyst could ask during requirements elicitation to understand the stakeholders’ expectations for those all-important quality attributes. That’s an often-neglected aspect of requirements exploration that frequently leads to deficiencies that can be expensive to correct later in development or after the product is released. This book can help you avoid those unpleasant outcomes.
Overlooked or poorly defined nonfunctional software requirements are widely recognized to be among the most expensive and difficult errors to correct after a softward system has been implemented. This book presents over 2,000 suggested questions to help master the elicitation of these hard-to-identify, yet vital, requirements. Its proven step-by-step techniques, insightful tips and tools, easy-to-use checklists, examples of nonfunctional requirements, and requirements-gathering questions, will assist the reader in developing and installing software requirements.
Defining and managing the requirements for a software system is hard! I’ve been interested in improving how projects handle their requirements for more than 35 years. I realized how important this was when I saw how many projects—including my own—struggled and failed when they neglected to build a solid foundation of well-understood and clearly communicated requirements. I’ve personally used nearly all of the techniques described in my book Software Requirements, and I got always better results when I applied those techniques. My books, articles, training courses, presentations, and videos on requirements have been helpful to thousands of business analysts worldwide for many years.
I recognized the value of use cases the first time I used them successfully on a project. Some years later I developed a 1-day training course on use cases. I read four of the most popular use case books then available, cover to cover, one right after the other. Use Cases: Requirements in Context did the best job of presenting a practical approach to applying the use case technique.
Shifting the requirements focus from system features to a usage-centric viewpoint provides many benefits, and use cases are the best way I’ve found to approach that. They provide an organizational structure for grouping related information relating to how users will interact with the system to perform tasks. This book describes a solid way to apply the use case technique.
This book describes how to gather and define software requirements using a process based on use cases. It shows systems analysts and designers how use cases can provide solutions to the most challenging requirements issues, resulting in effective, quality systems that meet the needs of users.
Use Cases, Second Edition: Requirements in Context describes a three-step method for establishing requirements-an iterative process that produces increasingly refined requirements. Drawing on their extensive, real-world experience, the authors offer a wealth of advice on use-case driven lifecycles, planning for change, and keeping on track. In addition, they include numerous detailed examples to illustrate…
Defining and managing the requirements for a software system is hard! I’ve been interested in improving how projects handle their requirements for more than 35 years. I realized how important this was when I saw how many projects—including my own—struggled and failed when they neglected to build a solid foundation of well-understood and clearly communicated requirements. I’ve personally used nearly all of the techniques described in my book Software Requirements, and I got always better results when I applied those techniques. My books, articles, training courses, presentations, and videos on requirements have been helpful to thousands of business analysts worldwide for many years.
Many agile projects employ user stories as a way to represent requirements rather than a more traditional approach combining use cases and functional requirements. I favor the latter approach for several reasons. Nonetheless, user stories are well established in the agile development world, and if you wish to learn about them, there’s no better author to read than Mike Cohn. Cohn describes how to craft user stories well and how they fit into the agile development process.
Thoroughly reviewed and eagerly anticipated by the agile community, User Stories Applied offers a requirements process that saves time, eliminates rework, and leads directly to better software.
The best way to build software that meets users' needs is to begin with "user stories": simple, clear, brief descriptions of functionality that will be valuable to real users. In User Stories Applied, Mike Cohn provides you with a front-to-back blueprint for writing these user stories and weaving them into your development lifecycle.
You'll learn what makes a great user story, and what makes a bad one. You'll discover practical ways to gather…
I’ve been a professional software engineer and maintaining open-source software for 16 years. My work on open source has been heavily informed by industry best practises and my work on proprietary software has been heavily informed by open source best practises. Without these books, I’d be a worse engineer on many dimensions. Some of them may feel antiquated but all are still full of relevant wisdom for every open-source (and proprietary) software engineer today.
Another book that predates GitHub but provides a lot of actionable advice today that’s been mostly ignored across much of our industry.
Hard problems like “why isn’t my software project reliable?” are tackled head-on and addressed here. It was an early nudge for me to automate as much as possible in software projects and not ignore difficult problems with project organisation in favour of “fun” technical tasks.
"Ship It!" is a collection of tips that show the tools and techniques a successful project team has to use, and how to use them well. You'll get quick, easy-to-follow advice on modern practices: which to use, and when they should be applied. This book avoids current fashion trends and marketing hype; instead, readers find page after page of solid advice, all tried and tested in the real world. Aimed at beginning to intermediate programmers, "Ship It!" will show you: which tools help, and which don't, how to keep a project moving, approaches to scheduling that work, how to build…
I’ve been a professional software engineer and maintaining open-source software for 16 years. My work on open source has been heavily informed by industry best practises and my work on proprietary software has been heavily informed by open source best practises. Without these books, I’d be a worse engineer on many dimensions. Some of them may feel antiquated but all are still full of relevant wisdom for every open-source (and proprietary) software engineer today.
This is the oldest book on my list and is the most underrated. It describes, with serious rigour and detail, how to run more effective software projects and teams.
Most of this advice has been ignored by most of the industry for most of the time but it’s a big part of the reason I’ve worked from home for 14 years and am as productive as I am today.
Demarco and Lister demonstrate that the major issues of software development are human, not technical. Their answers aren't easy--just incredibly successful. New second edition features eight all-new chapters. Softcover. Previous edition: c1987. DLC: Management.
I have worked for some really toxic leaders in my lifetime. Over the decades, I’ve figured out that even well-intentioned people can be toxic leaders without knowing it. As a team and leadership performance coach for the past 15 years, my job has been to help leaders show up as people others want to follow; to help employees feel cared for, and as a result, be intrinsically motivated to care about their company’s mission. These books represent the figurative fuel in my tank for this work, and I hope you find them useful.
One of the core concepts of how we live our lives–including how we lead–is our mindset. This book, better than any other I’ve read, captures what a mindset actually is: values, beliefs, and principles, and how the three combine to make us feel right about our behaviors–even when we’re wrong.
We all have mindsets for driving, parenting, leading, being a partner, and many other areas of life. I find that in my work, the more that I can help someone examine their values, beliefs, and principles, the more success they will have in changing their behaviors. While the book is about more than mindsets, I continually use Broza’s explanation of the concept in my work.
Does your Agile team experience the following common problems?
Members use established Agile practices and tools, but with little motivation or buy-in.
Even though the team is cross-functional, members don’t collaborate effectively or leverage everyone’s abilities.
Rather than act empowered, they wait for permission and approval.
Improvement has stalled — the team performs okay, but it can do so much better.You can’t solve these problems with more practices, rules, and tools. These are people problems.
If you’re a manager, Scrum Master, project manager, or delivery lead — or you aspire to be — you can make all the difference to…
Frans Johansson is the Co-Founder and CEO at The Medici Group, an enterprise solutions firm that helps organizations build and sustain high-performing teams through our revolutionary team coaching platform: Renaissance. Our firm's ethos--diversity and inclusion drive innovation--is informed by our work with over 4,000 teams in virtually every sector and by his two books The Medici Effect and The Click Moment.
This is the most complete take on how to bring diversity, inclusion, and belonging into your team. This is a very practical guide that shows you how to implement this process step by step. Not only does she explain how to respond to the negative tropes, but she also lays out detailed approaches to make sure your allies and angels do maximum good. A must-read if you want to avoid the common mistakes that bog down this process.
In this groundbreaking guide, a management expert outlines the transformative leadership skill of tomorrow-one that can make it possible to build truly diverse and inclusive teams which value employees' need to belong while being themselves.
Humans have two basic desires: to stand out and to fit in. Companies respond by creating groups that tend to the extreme-where everyone fits in and no one stands out, or where everyone stands out and no one fits in. How do we find that happy medium where workers can demonstrate their individuality while also feeling they belong?
You know what ages like milk? Programming books. I always cringe when someone glances at my programming bookshelf. Some of those books are so dated, they make me appear out of touch by association. Sometimes, I feel compelled to justify myself. “Yes, that's the first edition of Thinking in Java…I keep it for nostalgic reasons, you know!” Yesterday’s software book is today’s fish and chip wrapper. However, there are exceptions. A few classics stay relevant for years, or even decades. This is a shortlist of software books that might be older than you, but are still very much worth reading.
In my consulting gigs, I come across plenty of clueless remarks. Here's a classic one: “We're falling behind schedule, so let's hire more coders.” Or a more recent gem: “We'll be ten times more productive if we generate code with AI.”
When I encounter such nonsense, I don't facepalm or cringe. Instead, I put on my poker face and drop a quote from The Mythical Man-Month.
In an industry where last year’s book is already outdated, Fred Brooks' collection of essays has been a guiding light for nearly half a century. His aphorisms have become legendary. “The bearing of a child takes nine months, no matter how many women are assigned.” “Adding manpower to a late software project makes it later.” “There is no silver bullet.” The list goes on and on.
John Carmack, one of the greatest programmers of our times, used to revisit this book every year or…
Few books on software project management have been as influential and timeless as The Mythical Man-Month. With a blend of software engineering facts and thought-provoking opinions, Fred Brooks offers insight for anyone managing complex projects. These essays draw from his experience as project manager for the IBM System/360 computer family and then for OS/360, its massive software system. Now, 20 years after the initial publication of his book, Brooks has revisited his original ideas and added new thoughts and advice, both for readers already familiar with his work and for readers discovering it for the first time.
I’ve been doing large-scale software development at great US businesses from the introduction of the PC to the cloud explosion. From my earliest successes (online banking at US Bank in 1985!) to my biggest failures (Wells Fargo “Core” disaster in 2006), I’ve always sought better ways of doing things. These five books all were important to my learning and remain highly relevant, and I hope you find them useful as well.
When this book was released, I was immersed in a huge failing project at Wells Fargo, struggling to make sense of it all. This book helped me put the failure in perspective and showed a better way that I embraced for the rest of my career.
The key insight is that large-scale innovation is not like manufacturing – it is less about planning and control, more about people, rapid learning, and adaptation. Here we learn concepts such as the Chief Engineer, lightweight milestone—and responsibility-based project management, and focusing on engineering skills and vendor partnerships. Shelve the elaborate process frameworks consultants are selling you, focus on the basics Toyota emphasized throughout their glory years.
The ability to bring new and innovative products to market rapidly is the prime critical competence for any successful consumer-driven company. All industries, especially automotive, are slashing product development lead times in the current hyper-competitive marketplace. This book is the first to thoroughly examine and analyze the truly effective product development methodology that has made Toyota the most forward-thinking company in the automotive industry.
Winner of the 2007 Shingo Prize For Excellence In Manufacturing Research!
In The Toyota Product Development System: Integrating People, Process, and Technology, James Morgan and Jeffrey Liker compare and contrast the world-class product development process of…
