Agile Software Requirements is Done

Phew,

Amazingly, I have finally finished the new book Agile Software Requirements: Lean Requirements Practices for Teams, Programs and the Enterprise. It is now at the publishers for final copy editing and production: 23 chapters, 250 figures, preface, acknowledgements, appendices, biblio, how to read this book. 400+ pages. I’d like to thank Addison-Wesley peer reviewers Robert Bogetti, Sarah Edrie, Alexander Yakima, Brad Jackson and Gabor Gunyho.  (MANY others contributed as well, but that’s for the full acknowledgement). Gabor Gunyho from F-Secure Corp in Finland, was the most thorough reviewer I’ve ever worked with. He provided a ton of value (and caused me the most work). Thanks Gabor :-)!

For whatever reason, this was the most complex book project of my career. It took me the longest ( about 2 years) and I worked the hardest at it. Maybe it was a harder book to write, or maybe there’s twice as many illustrations, or maybe it’s a good book, or maybe I’m just getting old.

In any case, it should be on the bookshelves in the next 60 days or so, maybe sooner, but since Addison-Wesley was pretty patient with me, I don’t think I’ll bug them about that now (for at least a week or two…).

And since its going to print now, I won’t be pushing any new book-specific content to the blog for a bit, but I’m sure some other interesting topics will come up.

If someone has interest in a particular chapter’s content, ping me.

New Chapter – Use Cases

Well, I’ve been pretty quiet for a while as I finally had to focus completely on getting my new book (Agile Software Requirements) finished. But it is finally ready and the reviewed manuscript will go off to Addison-Wesley in the next week or two, with publication sometime this fall.

As I’ve described before, in addition to coverage of user stories, backlog items, nonfunctional requirements, requirements discovery and analysis techniques, vision expressions, etc, I’ve included a chapter on use cases. I wrote this chapter for serious agile system developers who don’t feel the need to forget everything that worked before when new things come along.

In reviewing the draft chapter, Alistair Cockburn was gracious in providing some quotes and comments, so I though I’d share this chapter here. You might also enjoy the following post from Alistair that I used in positioning this chapter.

I hope it delivers value. I’ve always been a big fan of use cases. But only because they work.

And thanks Alistair.