“I spend much time helping organizations capture requirements and even more time helping them recover from not capturing requirements. Many of them have gone through some motions regarding requirements as if they were sleepworking. It’s time to wake up and do it right–and this book is going to be their alarm clock.”

     –Jerry Weinberg, author of numerous books on productivity enhancement

“In today’s complex, fast-paced software development environment, collaboration–the intense peer-to-peer conversations that result in products, decisions, and knowledge sharing–is absolutely essential to success. But all too often, attempts to collaborate degenerate into agonizing meetings or ineffectual bull sessions. Ellen's wonderful book will help you bridge the gap–turning the agony of meetings into the ecstasy of effective collaboration.”

     –Jim Highsmith, a pioneer in adaptive software development methods

“Requirements by Collaboration presents a wealth of practical tools and techniques for facilitating requirements development workshops. It is suitable–no, essential reading–for requirements workshop facilitators. It will help both technical people and customer representatives participate in these critical contributions to software success.”

     –Karl Wiegers, Principal Consultant, Process Impact, author of Software Requirements

“The need for this particular book, at this particular time, is crystal clear. We have entered a new age where software development must be viewed as a form of business problem solving. That means direct user participation in developing ‘requirements,’ or more accurately, in jointly working the business problem. That, in turn, means facilitated sessions. In this book, Ellen Gottesdiener provides a wealth of practical ideas for ensuring that you have exactly the right stuff for this all-important area of professional art.”

     –Ronald G. Ross, Principal, Business Rule Solutions, LLC, Executive Editor, www.BRCommunity.com

“Gottesdiener’s years of software development experience coupled with her straight-forward writing style make her book a perfect choice for either a senior developer or a midlevel project manager. In addition to her technical experience, her knowledge of group dynamics balance the book by educating the reader on how to manage conflict and personality differences within a requirements team–something that is missing from most requirements textbooks...It is a required ‘handbook’ that will be referred to again and again.”

     –Kay Christian, ebusiness Consultant, Conifer, Colorado

“Requirements by Collaboration is a ‘must read’ for any system stakeholder. End users and system analysts will learn the significant value they can add to the systems development process. Management will learn the tremendous return they may receive from making a modest time/people investment in facilitated sessions. Facilitators will discover ways to glean an amazing amount of high-quality information in a relatively brief time.”

     –Russ Schwartz, Computer System Quality Consultant, Global Biotechnology Firm

“In addition to showing how requirements are identified, evaluated, and confirmed, Ellen provides important guidance based on her own real-world experience for creating and managing the workshop environment in which requirements are generated. This book is an engaging and invaluable resource for project teams and sponsors, both business and IT, who are committed to achieving results in the most productive manner possible.”

     –Hal Thilmony, Senior Manager, Business Process Improvement (Finance), CiscoSystems, Inc.

“Project managers should read this book for assistance with planning the requirements process. Experienced facilitators will enrich their knowledge. New facilitators can use this book to get them up to speed and become more effective in less time.”

     –Rob Stroober, Competence Development Manager and Project Manager, Deloitte &Touche Consultdata, The Netherlands

“While many books discuss the details of software requirement artifacts (for example, use cases), Ellen’s new book zeros in on effective workshop techniques and tools used to gather the content of these artifacts. As a pioneer in requirements workshops, she shares her real-life experiences in a comprehensive and easy-to-read book with many helpful examples and diagrams.”

     –Bill Bird, Aera Energy LLC

“Requirements by Collaboration is absolutely full of guidance on the most effective ways to use workshops in requirements capture. This book will help workshop owners and facilitators to determine and gain agreement on a sound set of requirements, which will form a solid foundation for the development work that is to follow.”

     –Jennifer Stapleton, Software Process Consultant and author of DSDM: The Methodin Practice

“This book provides an array of techniques within a clear, structured process, along with excellent examples of how and when to use them. It’s an excellent, practical, and really useful handbook written by a very experienced author!”

     –Jean-Anne Kirk, Director DSDM Consortium and IAF Professional Development

“Ellen has written a detailed, comprehensive, and practical handbook for facilitating groups in gathering requirements. The processes she outlines give the facilitator tools to bring together very different perspectives from stakeholders elegantly and with practical, useable results.”

     –Jo Nelson, Principal, ICA Associates, Inc., Chair, IAF (2001-2002)

Requirements by Collaboration: Workshops for Defining Needs focuses on the human side of software development--how well we work with our customers and teammates. Experience shows that the quality and degree of participation, communication, respect, and trust among all the stakeholders in a project can strongly influence its success or failure. Ellen Gottesdiener points out that such qualities are especially important when defining user requirements and she shows in this book exactly what to do about that fact.

Gottesdiener shows specifically how to plan and conduct requirements workshops. These carefully organized and facilitated meetings bring business managers, technical staff, customers, and users into a setting where, together, they can discover, evolve, validate, verify, and agree upon their product needs. Not only are their requirements more effectively defined through this collaboration, but the foundation is laid for good teamwork throughout the entire project.

Other books focus on how to build the product right. Requirements by Collaboration focuses instead on what must come first--the right product to build.

Amazon.com® Reader Reviews (Ranked by Helpfulness)

Average Amazon.com® Rating:  Based on 16 Ratings

Lots of useful Information for experienced requirements engineers - 2007-02-21
Reviewer Rating:
I'm a software developer and have a lot of experience writing Vision- and "Use Cases"-documents.
Writing these documents is not a big deal, however to make the customers read
"Use Case"-documents and provide feedback is much more difficult. But without feedback
it is not possible for a developer to write correct requirement documents.

I ordered this book because I liked the word "collaboration" in its title. It implies
the importance of working together with the customer in order to get the requirements right.
As I expected the author concentrates much more on the process to elicit proper requirements
rather than on the notations of requirements models such as UML. The best way to collaborate
with customers is to have structered meetings the so called workshops.

The book is divided into following three parts: "1. Overview of Requirements Workshops",
"2. Requirements Workshop Framework", "3. Requirements Workshop Design Strategies". Especially
the 2nd part contains a lot of detailed information and sometimes it is difficult not to get
lost. But part one and three are quit easy to follow.

Only in part one is a chapter which describes the different requirements models.
They are categorized according to their view, focus and level of detail. After reading this chapter you
know when to use which model. "Use Case"-Models are the most popular requirements models.
However, there are software projects in which other requirements model are more appropriate.
This chapter gives you an overview of the 19 different models.
Although a brief summary of every model is provided there is no example. If you want to know
the details of these different models you have to look for other sources of information.

The rest of the book concentrates on the prepartion and facilitation of workshops. A lot of useful
advice is given on how to manage people, content and processes in a workshop. Most of the
content of the book is aimed at facilitors of workshops. If you have nobody in your company who
has the necessary skillset to facilitate workshops, the author recommends to hire someone from
a consulting company, who can do this for your workshops.

On the author's website there several useful templates and guidelines which help you make your
workshops more successfull.

This book is a recommended reading for everyone who is responsible for the success of a software project.

Definitive Book about Requirement Workshops - 2009-04-30
Reviewer Rating:
This terrific book puts the focus where it belongs on getting effective stakeholder participation in the elicitation process. There is no other book that provides as much insight and guidance on Requirement Workshop techniques.

The things I liked best about this book are:
1. Solid documentation capturing how requirement workshops are a value-add proposition relative to other elicitation techniques.
2. The provision of multiple techniques that can be used in each element of the requirements workshop process. (It's not just the workshop itself but the process elements before and after)
3. Workshop Case studies which show how theory hits reality.
4. Superb readability and excellent presentation of material with supporting illustrations and models.

This is another must-half on the shelf of a Requirements Analyst professional. I have no hesitation in recommending this book.

How to do requirements workshops that work? - 2006-12-10
Reviewer Rating:
In Requirements by Collaboration, Ellen Gottesdiener shares many years of experience in running requirement workshops. In this area, Ellen might be one of the most experienced facilitators in the world.

The author provides a framework for organizing requirements workshops. The framework is based on getting six Ps right. The Ps are "Purpose, Participants, Principles, Products, Place and Process". For each step it describes typical things that need to be done. First establish a share purpose. Find the right participants for the workshop. Set the principles and ground rules. Decide what work products to create (the book provides an excellent overview of work products used in requirement analysis). Define the requirements for the location and decide where to hold the workshop and decide the process to hold it.

In each steps, the author provides great tips and insights from her experience in facilitating workshops. In the later part, some strategies of requirement analysis are presented and the book ends with some case studies.

Overall, the book is well written an easy to read. The requirement workshop framework, at times seems overly complex and certainly would need to be tailored to the specific situation. However, I think this could not have been prevented when talking about a generic way of holding requirement workshops.

In Agile Development, requirement workshops are one way of doing requirement analysis and spreading the requirement analysis over the whole project. For these kind of workshops, this book is probably the only reference, eventhough the book itself does not cover this very well. Therefore "requirements by collaboration" is a must read for anyone who wants to do requirements workshops.

IT Professional Must-Have Resource - 2010-02-18
Reviewer Rating:
Getting people from disparate stakeholder groups to work together to define and agree on requirements is a monumental task. It requires technical knowledge, active listening and negotiation skills to navigate through the hidden agendas and competing priorities associated with software-intensive projects. Requirements by Collaboration is an exceptional resource that contains proven techniques for facilitating requirements workshops. The book is easy to read, well organized and full of illustrations, helpful hints and web site references. It's a must have for today's IT professional.

add it to your collection - 2007-11-14
Reviewer Rating:
Add this to your collection of professional development books; you likely won't be disappointed - but remember, like anyone who is good, they make it look easy.

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