How Parts of This Book Relate

Each of the four parts of this booklike the disciplines they pull fromare standalone and can be read and used independently of one another. A few of the techniques can, however, be leveraged off of one another.

Project portfolio management (Part 4, Chapter 8) is over-arching in relationship to all other topics in this book in that stresses in a company due to "too much work, too little time" affect virtually every other aspect of software development and the quality of products produced. A company that has not sorted its vital few projects from the trivial many is likely to have staff with neither the interest nor time for qnew innovative ideas.

The biggest bang for the buck in applying the ideas of Part 3, "Model-Based Specification," will come from application to use cases that are frequently used and/or are critical in nature. The techniques on describing operational profiles in Part 2, "Software Reliability Engineering," are ideal for identifying such use cases, as are the prioritization techniques of Part 1, "Quality Function Deployment."

It is also possible to use frequency of use information or criticality information obtained from an operational profile (Part 2, "Software Reliability Engineering") as one of many business drivers used to prioritize use cases with QFD. An example of this is provided in Chapter 2, "Aligning Decision Making and Synchronizing Distributed Development Horizontally in the Organization."

Conversely, you may find that a QFD matrix (Part 1, "Quality Function Deployment") is an ideal tool for building informal operational profiles for a product (Part 2, "Software Reliability Engineering").