Requirements form the foundation for all the software work that follows. Arriving at a shared vision of the product to be developed is one of the greatest challenges facing the software project team, and customer involvement is among the most critical factors in software quality. The objective of this two-day course is to give attendees a tool-kit of practices, reinforced with exercises and group discussions, that they can begin applying to improve the quality of the requirements engineering and requirements management processes in their organization.
This course describes dozens of tested methods that can help any organization improve the way it elicits, analyzes, documents, verifies, and manages software requirements. Characteristics of excellent requirements statements and requirements specifications are presented and used to evaluate some sample functional requirements.
This course will be useful to software engineers, managers, requirements analysts, user representatives, and anyone else engaged in gathering, documenting, analyzing, or managing customer requirements for software applications. Non-software people who provide requirements to developers have also found the course to be easy to understand.
An HTML registration form is here; a printable
.pdf registration form is here.
Day 1:
I. Introduction to Requirements Engineering
8:30 Introduction to seminar, objectives, participant expectations
9:45 Break
9:55 Group Discussions: requirements problems
10:20 Requirements Development
11:00 Break
11:10 Requirements Development, classifying voice of the customer
11:30 Product Champions
12:00 Lunch
1:00 Use Cases
1:50 Use Case practice
2:05 Business rules
2:20 Software Requirements specification
2:45 Break
2:55 Practice Review, examine poor requirements
3:30 Break
3:40 Quality attributes
4:10 Prioritizing requirements
4:30 End of the day
Day 2:
8:30 Analysis models
9:00 Dialog map
9:25 Dialog map practice and debrief
9:45 Break
9:55 Prototyping and complete requirements development
10:25 CMM, CMMI and process improvement
10:55 Break
11:05 Requirements management principles and key practices
11:45 Requirements management techniques
12:00 Lunch
1:00 Requirement management techniques (continued)
1:45 Requirements and risk management
2:00 Break
2:10 Group Discussions: requirements problems
2:35 Software Process Improvement
3:05 Break
3:15 Practice session: develop change management process
3:45 Review of requirements good practices
4:00 Practice session: action planning
4:15 Requirements traps to avoid, wrap up.
4:30 End of seminar.
Software Requirements: Practical Techniques for Gathering and Managing Requirements Throughout the Product Development Cycle, by Karl Wiegers, Microsoft Press, 2nd edition, 2003.
Serge Chevarie-Pelletier graduated in 1996 with a Computer Science degree (with honours) from the University of New Brunswick. Serge has more than nine years experience in software development with an emphasis on software process improvement, quality assurance and configuration management. He is actively involved in the NB chapter of the Software Process Improvement Network (NB SPIN) whose objective is to improve the productivity of the software industry in the region and advance the quality of software being produced. Prior to co-founding Surety Partners, M. Chevarie-Pelletier has held senior software engineering positions with security software companies Zeroknowledge Systems Inc. and Atlantic Systems Group Inc.