Product Description
By following the techniques in this book, it is possible to write requirements and specifications that customers, testers, programmers and technical writers will actually read, understand and use. These pages provide precise, practical instructions on how to distinguish requirements from design to produce clear solutions. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (14)

Up to chapter 3 and finding it useless
I have just finished Chapter 3 of this book and am near livid. The author has a confusing and abstract way of writing that is infuriating for those of us living in the practical world. The discussion regarding the intangibles of requirements and interfaces is a quagmire of confusing definitions. So far I have pulled nothing of use from these chapters and am more confused than when I started reading.

I am hopeful this all gets sorted out in later chapters because right now, this book is proving to be fairly useless at teaching this software engineer how to properly gather and formulate a requirements document.

If you are into theoretical rhetoric, it's a good choice.

Requirements and Specifications that People Read!
Writing requirements as a product manager has always been a black art to me.It's not impossible but it normally involves a lot of fudging and reading it always make me feel that there's something missing.I often end up putting specifications inside the requirements document.How do I make it complete without ending up writing the specifications itself?

Kovitz's Practical Software Requirements provides a clear and concise guide to writing requirements by looking at the problem of developing software.By examining how we frame a problem and its domains, the book explains how the reader can extract elements of the requirements and specifications documents and present them in a concise manner.

Throughout the book, he proposes how its content can be written and provides clear examples.His approach is direct and concise, and he teaches the reader how to write without any hint of legalese that permeate traditional corporate requirements documents.His examples are practical and he addresses common mistakes that writers make.

I've thoroughly enjoyed reading this book, and it has been an invaluable tool in helping me write better requirements and specifications at work.

A Terrific Book
This is a great book for anyone whose job includes:
*Business Analysis (for software)
*Application Programming
*Technical Writing

The book is about techniques for describing a problem to be solved by a piece of software without describing the design of software components. In other words, providing the information that the software designer needs at the correct level of detail, without trying to specify a software design.

Designing software involves joining informal, real-world problems to the formal world of computers. In the real world problems are messy, vague, and unbounded. Unfortunately, computers only solve problems that are well-defined, unambiguous and well-bounded. Requirements writing is the art of reducing a messy-real world problem to a neat, well-defined, unambiguous description which can be used to drive development of a computerized solution.

This is one of the first books to effectively bridge that gap. I say "effectively", because it is certainly not the first try--every software methodology has techniques for capturing requirements. However, the methodologies hopelessly intertwine requirements gathering with system interface specification and even system design. This inevitably results in requirements being given short-shrift.

Many of the techniques this book teaches are equally applicable to creating documentation for existing software. Every technical writer should learn to create models of the problem their software solves and then explain software functions using only the terms defined within the model.

I highly recommend this book. However, I do know some people who did not like it. If you find it disappointing, I suggest that you try practicing with one or two techniques, then give it another read. The ideas are often more subtle than they appear at first glance. Expect that you may need months to really absorb its advice.

It all starts with requirements...
This is a well written book that will help you write better documents. In addition to defining: what are Requirements; who should read them; and how to write them, this book gives some suggestions on what should happen next (i.e., the _Miracle_Occurs_Here_ box that is inserted after Requirements and before Coding). I would recommend this book to anyone involved in the software development process. Especially those struggling to get to CMM level 2.

great insights plus all the regular stuff
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this tells you all you need to know about requirements.

indeed, it tells a lot more than that because it explains things not just state them.

it kills some urban legends and myths about requirements that everyone should know but most people do not.but then most people do not know what they don't know.scare your phb, impress your colleagues with your wisdom after reading this book.

if you work with requirements, software, systems engineering, and especially systems architecture you need to read this book. even if you have read others and or think you know all about requirements you can still learn things that you didn't know or why what you thought was true actually is.

this book would work symbiotically with the art of systems architecture by rechtin and maier.read them both.

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