author : Ian Sommerville

This pragmatic guide provides an approach to introducing and improving a pragmatic process for eliciting, analysing, validating and managing software systems requirements.

Guidelines are provided for each step in the process. They range from advice on how to structure and layout the requirements document, through the use of checklists, on to data gathering and review techniques, all the way to building system analysis models and prototypes, and the introduction of formal methods.

Each guideline is classified as Basic -- where to start for those who don't yet have a process -- Intermediate -- for those looking for the first steps to improve their process -- or Advanced -- for those wishing to improve even further.

The guidelines are pragmatic, and the steps taken to introduce them are carefully laid out. Costs and benefits of adopting each guideline are also discussed. I would have preferred some concrete examples in places, to help pin down the precise concepts being discussed. But overall, this is a thoughtful and pragmatic text. If every software development adopted even only the Basic guidelines here, the quality and usefulness of the software produced today would improve dramatically.

• A typical user requirements statement: Dear Mr Architect