Requirements Resources

These are resources that we have found useful in our requirements work. By all means make use of them, and by all means please let us know if you have found resources that will be of use to others.

• ThinkAnalyse is Andrew Kendall's company. Andrew is the resident Australian Volere consultant, and offers consulting and training in business analysis and the Volere techniques. Contact Andrew at ThinkAnalyse.  
• The Jama Software blog has opinions and information for requirements analysts and innovators. Jama also has a requirements tool called Contour. This is listed on the tools page.
• The Australian Business Analysts Association provides events, skills development, advice and certification of Business Analysts in Australia.
• The Volere Requirements Specification Template is a guide to writing a requirements document. It suggest ways of writing your requirements, and provides a structure for the document.
• RQNG the Requirements Networking Group. An active site with articles, forums, blogs about requirements. 
• A survey of requirements engineering tools gives you a review of most of the current tools.
• The International Institute of Business Analysts (IIBA) promotes the idea of business analysts becoming certified. Analysts should check out the Business Analysis Body of Knowledge (BABOK), currently at version 2.0. Your Volere authors are technical reviewers for the BABOK.
• The UK Chapter of the IIBA is particularly active and has monthly events of interest to business analysts.
• Software Requirements Message Board hosted by Seilevel. Discussion on issues relating to requirements.
• IREB, the International Requirements Engineering Board offers certification for professional requirements engineering (CPRE) at three levels.
• The ISEB is a UK-based examination board with a diplomas in business analysis and systems development.
• Join the Volere Google Group for discussions of all things Volere. Or send an email.
• Joel Spolsky's Joel on Software site is well worth a visit. Joel writes about software development, and has some wonderful insights into the process.
• Alistair Cockburn has some interesting stuff on agile development.
• The Requirements Engineering Specialist Group of the British Computer Society has some interesting events and publishes the Requirements Quarterly Newsletter.
• Didar Zowighi's RE-online discussion group about requirements engineering. To subscribe to the group, send "subscribe re-online" (without the quotes) in the body of an email message to majordomo@it.uts.edu.au. The discussion group has a worldwide collection of requirements experts discussing topical issues. It is also a great place to ask for help.
• Karl Wiegers' Process Impact has a lot to say about software process improvement. Karl's requirements books make for good reading.

• INCOSE. The International Council on Systems Engineering have a Requirements Management Tools Survey.

• John Favaro is a software guru with a good grasp of economics — a subject that is all too rare in our field. He has some interesting things to say at http://www.favaro.net/john/home/essays/index.html. John's site contains lots of other useful stuff.

• Alan Davis has updated his very comprehensive list of requirements engineering articles and books.

• Carol Dekkers at Quality Plus Technologies has lots to say about how to count function points and use them to help manage requirements.
• The Centre for Human Computer Interaction Design is an independent research centre within City University in London. Much of the Centre's work is about requirements, including the development of ART-SCENE which automatically generates rich scenarios from use case descriptions. Stakeholders can then walk through these scenarios using the Scenario Presenter, exploring normal and alternative course events in turn, and documenting new requirements and comments as they go. Please contact Professor Neil Maiden for further information.