This is the Rough Cut version of the printed book.
Too many software applications don’t do what’s needed or they do it clumsily, frustrating their users and owners. The core problem: poorly conceived and poorly crafted requirements. In Designing the Requirements, Chris Britton explains why it’s not enough to simply “gather” requirements–you need to design them.
Britton offers powerful techniques for understanding stakeholders’ concerns and working with stakeholders to get the requirements right. Using Britton’s context-driven approach to requirements design, you can detect inconsistencies, incompleteness, poor usability, and misalignment with business goals upstream–long before developers start coding. You can also design outward-looking applications and services that will integrate more effectively in a coherent IT architecture.
First, Britton explains what requirements design really means and presents a hierarchy of designs that move step-by-step from requirements through implementation. Next, he demonstrates how to build on requirements processes you already use and how to overcome their serious limitations in large-scale development. Then, he walks you through designing your application’s relationship with the business, users, data, and other software to ensure superior usability, security, and maximum scalability and resilience.
Coverage includes
Designing the entire business solution, not just its software component
Using engineering-style design analysis to find flaws before implementation
Designing services, and splitting large development efforts into smaller, more manageable projects
Planning logical user interfaces that lead to superior user experiences
Designing databases and data access to reflect the meaning of your data
Building application frameworks that simplify life for programmers and project managers
Setting reasonable and achievable goals for performance, availability, and security
Designing for security at all levels, from strategy to code
Identifying new opportunities created by context-driven design
Whether you’re a software designer, architect, project manager, or programmer, Designing the Requirements will help you design software that works–for users, IT, and the entire business.
Chris Britton has more than forty years of wide-ranging IT experience. He started programming in the 1970s, shortly thereafter becoming a database specialist for large mainframe systems. During the 1980s, he helped develop SIM, a pioneering semantic database product, and later held a variety of responsibilities in systems support, marketing support, IT architecture, and management. During the 1990s, he increasingly focused on IT architecture and coauthored two editions of IT Architectures and Middleware (Addison-Wesley). Since 2001, he has consulted and developed software applications for his own company.
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