Skills and Experience Needed by the Reader

This book can be used with no previous experience of specifying requirements. Chapter 1 is a "crash course" containing the bare minimum that a novice reader needs to get started. A good general book on requirements engineering (such as those cited at the beginning of Chapter 1) is a better introduction, and readers who have read them or who are already experienced business analysts are likely to get more from this book. Software engineers using agile methods can use the book in isolation. Anyone responsible for reviewing a requirements specification needs no previous knowledge or skills in order to use this book to help them.

This book is accessible to a nontechnical reader. It focuses on writing textual requirements in natural language that can be read by anyone. It is free of arcane diagram formats, deep theory, and jargon. You can read it without knowing UML (Unified Modeling Language) or any other formal technique.