Lessons from the Requirements Management Business

This portion of my career was heavily influenced by Dr. Alan Davis, who was Editor in Chief of IEEE Software magazine and held the El Pomar Endowed Chair of Software Engineering at the University of Colorado in Colorado Springs. Al joined the company as a director and advisor early on and was instrumental in influencing our technology and the business direction. He is well known for his leadership in the field of requirements engineering. Al was also active in consulting activities and had developed a number of techniques for helping companies improve their requirements process. These techniques were merged with some of the RELA-derived techniques and became the basis of a professional training offering called Requirements College, the basis for parts of this book.

In addition, operating under the insufficiently popular business theory of " you can never have too much professional help ," we recruited renowned software author and expert Ed Yourdon to join the board of the company. Ed was also highly influential in guiding the course of the technology and business direction. Both Ed and Al were earlier contributors to this work, and many of the words that appear in this book are theirs. Indeed, we had intended to release the book jointly a few years ago. But times change, and Ed and Al have graciously donated all of their earlier work to us. However, you will often hear them speaking through these words.

We also became exposed to the use case technique for requirements capture, and to the concept of using use cases within the design model to provide a common thread to drive architecture, implementation, and testing.

I am also a fan of Rational's promulgation of the iterative approach for software development, of which I like to think that we were early practitioners at RELA, as well as the Rational Unified Process, a full lifecycle software development process.

Rational helped me complete this work, and for that I am grateful. Also, Rational graciously provided permission to use certain ideas, text, and diagrams.