Requirements drive almost every activity, task, and deliverable in a software development project. By applying a few key skills and an iterative development approach, you can evolve requirements that can help ensure success for your project. Taking the time at the beginning of a project to define and document needs, features, and requirements enables you to establish traceability to ensure that your software requirements specification aligns with your business objectives and continues to do so throughout the project. Use the resources here to examine best practices, tools, and methodologies for requirements analysis, and then map those requirements to IT capabilities and solutions.
Requirements: An introduction
: Find out why accurate requirements are an essential part of the formula for software project success. This article explains why and describes a three-fold approach to effective requirements documentation.
Understanding types of use cases and artifacts
: Examine different types of use cases and artifacts, and learn how to introduce use-case techniques to a team that is unfamiliar with them.
Dissecting business from software requirements
: Explore techniques for dissecting complex requirement statements so that business and software requirements become more distinct.
Capturing business requirements using use cases
: Learn seven practical principles for capturing business requirements, based on experiences with a business requirements engineering project for Simpay, a payment system that operates through a mobile phone.
Requirements methods
(PDF): Explore three prototypical requirements methods: an extreme requirements method, an agile requirements method, and a robust requirements method.
Key principles for business-driven development
: Get familiar with a new set of principles that characterize the industry's best practices in the creation, deployment, and evolution of software-intensive systems.
Software development productivity and project success rates: Are we attacking the right problem?
You might know how to use great requirements management tools like Rational RequisitePro, but how do you know you're managing the right requirements in the first place? This article proposes a solution to an interesting problem.
Transitioning from requirements to design
(PDF): Lay the foundation for a smooth transition from requirements specification to design by focusing on how far a team should go with use cases before beginning design, a framework for identifying architecturally significant requirements, and how to utilize use-case realizations as the pivotal artifact to bridge the transition from requirements specification to design.
Applying Rational tools to a simple J2EE-based project
:
Work through applying the IBM Rational® Unified Process and other Rational tools to a development project on a tight schedule and budget with this three-part series. Part 1 covers high-level planning and requirements solicitation.
Building the right software development infrastructure for your business needs
: Make the right buying decisions to strengthen a software development infrastructure and create an on demand environment. Part 1 discusses prioritizing business and infrastructure needs, defining needs for a request for proposal (RFP), and options for enhancing requirements and analysis capabilities.
Reduce complexity with model-driven development
: Explore this series, which takes you end to end through the requirements gathering, business modeling, and application development and deployment stages of the solution development process.
Streamline SOA development using service mocks
: Upgrade the quality of your SOA applications with use cases and mock objects. Author Bobby Woolf details a 5-step process to ease development when working with multiple teams.
Comment lines: Why do nonfunctional requirements matter?
Functionality is important, of course. But if you don't consider nonfunctional requirements, then your solution could very well be practically useless.
A tour of Rational visual tools for application development
: Get a guided tour of Rational tools available to help you visually design and develop software applications.
-
Rational RequisitePro®
is a requirements and use-case management tool for
project teams. Learn more about this product or download a trial version.
-
Rational ClearCase®
provides life-cycle management and control of
software development assets. Learn more about this product.
-
Rational SoDA automates the creation and maintenance of comprehensive project documentation and reports. Download a trial version.
-
Rational Software Modeler is a customizable, UML 2.0-based visual modeling and
design tool that enables the documentation and communication of processes, flows and designs. Learn more about this product or download a trial version.
-
IBM Rational Software Development Platform provides products, tools, and
services to help you build, integrate, modernize, extend, and deploy software and software-based systems. Learn more about this offering.
| 
