Essential System Requirements: A Practical Guide to Event–Driven Methods (Addison–Wesley Information Technology Series)

It is a costly fact that a large percentage of information system development projects fail––ending up over budget, behind schedule, or so poorly designed that they remain unused. Essential System Requirements targets the discovery and definition of critical system requirements in the analysis phase of system development––where good design is vital to the success of a project. This book explores a design methodology that involves users early on to describe essential business events. These events then partition the system response into logical, more easily managed segments. The result is a conceptual model that reflects real business needs and accelerates the entire delivery process.

Essential System Requirements assembles the information developers need to understand and apply this methodology and condenses it into a concise and practical guide. This book reviews the development life cycle, highlights the importance of requirements, and introduces the concept of business events. It provides a detailed description of experience–based techniques and methods to analyze, specify, and partition the requirements of an information system, covering project tasks and procedures, system behavior, data and process modeling techniques, and the transition to physical design.

Inside you will also find a clear description of function point estimation, a promising method of estimating the time and cost of future software projects based on system requirements. In addition, Essential System Requirements shows you how responses to business events can be partitioned across object classes, focusing on the application of use cases in event–driven requirements analysis.

Also featured:

* A middle–out strategy that is similar to the way humans typically categorize and classify objects. * The need for rapid development combined with a sound, scalable software architecture (RAAD). * A discussion of the changing world market and the related need for adaptive business systems. * The impact of making a major paradigm switch in a corporate software environment and ways to move to an event–driven approach. * The specification of a system response to an event using a business scenario, data model, process model, entity life cycle, and event/entity interaction (CRUD) matrix.

With this book as your guide, you will have at hand proven techniques for defining the systems your clients want and setting the stage for a smoother, faster, more easily managed development process.

From the Inside Flap
The Standish Group reports that tens of billions of dollars are wasted each year on information systems that are canceled or not used, with most projects over budget and/or late. On the other hand, the wrong system can be delivered on schedule, within budget. The primary problem has been that the system does not meet the expectations and needs of the business area for which it was built, typically because of inadequate user involvement in the early phases of system design. The challenge is to define the correct system requirements early in the delivery process to minimize design, construction, and post–implementation repair.

Accurate system requirements definition is a lost art for many organizations, but with the high cost of information systems and the competitive nature of business today, it is needed more than ever. An organization cannot afford to waste resources on post–requirements repair that could have been avoided. Essential System Requirements was written to provide a collection of event–driven methods for the analysis and specification of conceptual system requirements. I hope it will encourage and assist developers to "get it right the first time" by defining systems that are on target with the user‘s expectations. The term essential, as used in this book, refers to a set of system requirements that meets business–area needs without including unnecessary system capabilities. It also implies that the requirements are conceptual (non–physical) in nature. Although methods typically don‘t enforce a conceptual strategy, they can encourage the reduction of physical properties in the requirements. When this is accomplished, post–analysis repair can be reduced.

The most important aspect of this book is its underlying concept of business events and the partitioning of proposed systems into responses to those events. Business events are intuitive to the user and are typically accepted by both the user community and the development group. They get the user group involved early in the development life cycle by defining, in the user‘s language, activities that occur in the business area. Business events also help reduce the communication gap that often arises during the software development effort, and they partition the proposed system into subsystems that have relatively low coupling and support incremental development and implementation.

Essential System Requirements is a guide and therefore does not contain the amount of discussion found in most textbooks––discussion is limited to key basic concepts. It presents the methods and techniques in a concise manner to provide an effective instrument for the analyst, based on decades of software development experience. This book does not offer a particular commercial methodology but instead presents a set of core techniques and methods for the definition of system requirements. It follows a toolbox approach––that is, the methods and techniques are only used as needed, and are often repeated during the delivery process (some dependencies do exist, but iteration is the rule). For any particular project, some techniques may not be used at all. Along with the methods, this book integrates project management tips and a function–point project estimation method. It also offers a discussion of an object–oriented partitioning scheme that can be used with an event–driven user interface and that reuses many of the event–driven models.

Essential System Requirements will serve as a useful guide to the professionals responsible for the definition of system requirements and to those who manage the effort and develop the resulting system. As a guide, this book is meant to sit on your bookshelf, where, after initial study, it can be used for quick reference to the techniques and tips for the individual or the team. It can also support a corporate–wide effort to establish standards for the analysis and specification of system requirements.

For further discussion of the focus and organization of this book, please see the Introduction. 0201616068P04062001

From the back cover:

Backcover Copy

It is a costly fact that a large percentage of information system development projects fail––ending up over budget, behind schedule, or so poorly designed that they remain unused. Essential System Requirements targets the discovery and definition of critical system requirements in the analysis phase of system development––where good design is vital to the success of a project. This book explores a design methodology that involves users early on to describe essential business events. These events then partition the system response into logical, more easily managed segments. The result is a conceptual model that reflects real business needs and accelerates the entire delivery process.

Essential System Requirements assembles the information developers need to understand and apply this methodology and condenses it into a concise and practical guide. This book reviews the development life cycle, highlights the importance of requirements, and introduces the concept of business events. It provides a detailed description of experience–based techniques and methods to analyze, specify, and partition the requirements of an information system, covering project tasks and procedures, system behavior, data and process modeling techniques, and the transition to physical design.

Inside you will also find a clear description of function point estimation, a promising method of estimating the time and cost of future software projects based on system requirements. In addition, Essential System Requirements shows you how responses to business events can be partitioned across object classes, focusing on the application of use cases in event–driven requirements analysis.

Also featured:

• A middle–out strategy that is similar to the way humans typically categorize and classify objects.
• The need for rapid development combined with a sound, scalable software architecture (RAAD).
• A discussion of the changing world market and the related need for adaptive business systems.
• The impact of making a major paradigm switch in a corporate software environment and ways to move to an event–driven approach.
• The specification of a system response to an event using a business scenario, data model, process model, entity life cycle, and event/entity interaction (CRUD) matrix.

With this book as your guide, you will have at hand proven techniques for defining the systems your clients want and setting the stage for a smoother, faster, more easily managed development process.

0201616068B06012001

About the Author:

Author Bios

Bill Wiley is a consultant specializing in event–based methodology and system requirements definition. He has twenty–five years of experience in virtually all aspects of application development, spanning a wide range of systems, user groups, corporate environments, and hardware platforms. He spent eight years at the Johnson Space Center in Houston and has sixteen years of experience with manufacturing systems. His consulting experience includes methodology training and the application of event–driven analysis and design methods; he has also facilitated joint design sessions. Mr. Wiley most recently researched the application of various event–based methods during a nine–year tenure as an assistant professor of information systems at Taylor University.

0201616068AB04062001