Mastering the requirements process

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1. skydhashApr 2025
   There are three main subproblems to your questions:

   1. Find out what users wants. The answer to that is research and the only book I have is Just Enough Research by Erika Hall. I also found Essentials of Business Research Methods by Joe Hair Jr. et al.

   2. Build the thing that the user wants. That's mostly the real of Software Requirements and I have two candidates for you:

   - Mastering the Requirements Process: Getting Requirements Right by Suzanne and James Robertson

   - Software Requirements by Karl Wiegers and Joy Beatty.

   3. Build something that the user likes and that he can use. That's UX and I have three candidates this time:

   - Observing the User Experience, 2nd Edition by E. Goodman and M. Kunlavsky

   - Understanding Your Users, 2nd Edition by K. Baxter et al.

   - The UX Book by R. Hartson and P. S. Pyla

   All of those just emphasize having an objective view of what you want to bring to the users and a rational execution strategy. I haven't read all so I can't judge them, but I believe they will give you enough starting points for you to devise your own method.

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2. GFischerSep 2014
   Hmm. I've never seen a requirements document for a 6-figure contract.

   I have seen some for low 5-figure ones though.

   One starting point could be the IEEE standards (IEEE 830 and 1233)

   http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Software_requirements_specifica...

   http://www.math.uaa.alaska.edu/~afkjm/cs401/IEEE830.pdf

   although it's old and superseded

   http://programmers.stackexchange.com/questions/159274/what-s...

   According to Stack Overflow

   "29148:2011 standard seems to replace the IEEE 830:1998."

   There are also plenty of books on requirements, like for example:

   Mastering the Requirements Process Second Edition by Suzanne Robertson, James Robertson (published by Addison Wesley Professional )

   Edit: hopefully there are people here on HN that routinely either write or receive requirements documents of that magnitude and can help you more than I do :)

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