Training Material for Requirements Gathering

Question

At a small software company, we have several developers who are very competent programmers but who have no formal Software Engineering training. As part of their career development it is time to offer them greater responsibilities, particularly at the earlier stages of the software lifecycle.

What good training material is available about gathering, documenting, testing and reviewing software requirements? Ideally, we are looking for informal, self-guided training courses. Some of these developers would definitely prefer old-fashioned, paper books, as they commute but laptops are impractical for the journeys. We are still interested in all forms of training material though.

I'd prefer material that concentrates on practical issues, e.g., how to extract meaningful requirements from the various stakeholders.

The material should definitely cover alternatives to classical requirements gathering, e.g., user stories. We switch between development methodologies depending on the scope of the project and whether it is an internal or external project (and we are still learning how to do things better!). We don't want to limit the training to techniques currently employed by my development team...

Answer 1

http://www.tdan.com/view-articles/4842/

http://neptune.netcomp.monash.edu.au/cpe4004/Tutorial.htm

http://www.sitepoint.com/article/requirements-gathering/

http://neptune.netcomp.monash.edu.au/cpe4004/doc/TuteWeek1-3/TuteWeek1and3handout.pdf

http://labspace.open.ac.uk/file.php/1/kmap/1176653907/Wiki-based_requireme_13710857931176476022104_Outline.html

Answer 2

Have a look at the Atlantic System Guild and there especially at the work of the Robertsons. They have a templaste called Volere that might be a good starting point. It has got its own webpage lately.

Some qoute about the template:

This template is intended for use as the foundation for your requirements specifications. The template provides for each of the requirements types appropriate for today's business, scientific and software systems. It provides a checklist, structure and traceability for your requirements. Once you are in possession of the complete version, you can adapt it to your requirements gathering process and requirements tool. The template is tool independent, and has been successfully used with Requisite, DOORS, Caliber RM, IRqA and other popular tools. Most tool vendors we speak with agree that this template can be adopted with their tool.

And you will find a wealth of ressources on the page as well.

Answer 3

There are useful resources available from the perspective of a software architect at http://www.bredemeyer.com

A commendably short but useful document on functional requirements is:

"Functional Requirements and Use Cases", by Ruth Malan and Dana Bredemeyer, June 1999

And similarly for non-functional requirements:

"Defining Non-Functional Requirements", by Ruth Malan and Dana Bredemeyer, August 2001.