Resources

This is a collection of requirements, software engineering, software project management resources that we think are worth using, downloading or visiting.

Requirements

  • RE-online is a 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 used to be called SRE, and has a worldwide collection of requirements experts discussing topical issues. It is also a great place to ask for help. Further information for the mailing list can be found here.

  • Alan Davis has updated his very comprehensive list of RE articles at http://www.uccs.edu/~adavis/reqbib.htm   Alan also runs the Requirements Managament Place at http://www.RMPLACE.org

Software Engineering

  • Joel Spolsky's Joel on Software site is worth a visit. Go to the Complete Archive and look at the article called Painless Functional Specifications. I would give you the direct link but you should start at the home page and look at all he has to offer. http://www.joelonsoftware.com/index.html
  • Ian Sommerville is an academic, author, consultant and professor of software engineering at St Andrews University in Scotland. Ian's site contains supplementary material for his book. http://www.software-engin.com/
  • The IEEE Computer Society publish Software Magazine. In this author's opinion, the best magazine on the subject.
  • Dan Roam's Back of the Napkin site. Dan is an advocate of solving problems using pictures, and visual thinking.

Software Project Management

  • Creative Workshops Suzanne Robertson, Atlantic Systems Guild London and Neil Maiden Head of Human Computer Interface Design Centre at City University, London conducted a series of creative workshop they designed for Eurocontrol in Paris. The objective was to generate new ideas and requirements for air traffic management CORA-2 (Conflict Resolution Assistant), a system that will provide computerised assistance to air traffic controllers to resolve potential conflicts between aircraft. 

    The participants at the Paris workshops were air traffic controllers, pilots, systems developers, administrators, project managers and a pool of experts from many different fields - including music, cooking, visualisation and textile design. The workshops were participative, and helped people to unleash their creativity. Groups were coached and then worked together to generate as many new ideas as they could. Then we helped them to make the ideas more concrete and categorise them by value. The first workshop generated 80 new and innovative design ideas and constraints. We used these as input to the second workshop and sparked 125 ideas at varying levels of detail. Then the third workshop added customer value to the ideas and made the best ones into concrete design solutions. More...

  • Cutter Consortium The consortium is a focus group of people who are intent on making IT more closely aligned to a business's real purposes. It has special working groups that center around the particular concerns of its member organizations.
  • Software Quality Engineering, long known for its software test and evaluation technology and software quality programs, has recently become the US and Canadian agent for public offerings of Mastering the Requirements Process seminar. Also, while you're at the site, look into their very snazzy ASM, STAR and EuroSTAR conference programs. These three conferences are consistently among best of any given year.