Section 11.10. Resources

11.10. Resources

One of the original purposes of the World Wide Web was to allow researchers to share their results. So, you should be able to search the Web for requirements documents from various projects for examples of requirements specification. As with any Web search, remember to consider your source. Just because someone has posted a requirements specification or a template doesn't make it a good example.

Here are three examples that we found on a single simple Google search. They may still be there by now.

• http://www.progsoc.uts.edu.au/~timj/thesis/web/srs.html

• http://www2.ics.hawaii.edu/~johnson/413/lectures/5.2.html

• http://www.cc.gatech.edu/people/home/tomoyo/rocky-axel.1.doc

For those who are serious about their software development process, the Capability Maturity Model for Software from the Software Engineering Institute at Carnegie Mellon University is the standard. Visit their Web site at http://www.sei.cmu.edu/cmm/.

If you would like to know more about the spiral approach to software design, you might want to start with the seminal paper on the topic, "A Spiral Model of Software Development and Enhancement," in Computer 21, no. 5 (May 1988), pages 6172.

To see how the director of the Software Engineering Institute views the spiral approach, check out the short and readable introduction at http://www.dacs.dtic.mil/awareness/newsletteres/technews2-1/disciplined.html.

Another good look at the spiral, or iterative, approach can be found at http://www.stickyminds.com/se/S3420.asp which has a hyperlink for a PDF file of a paper by Philippe Kruchten of Rational Software. The paper covers some pitfalls common to the first uses of the iterative approach; worth the read.

A great survey of key papers on three major approachesspiral and related topics (including newer work by Boehm), aspect-oriented programming (AOP), and the rational unified processis at http://www.rspa.com/reflib/PrescriptiveModels.html.