Acknowledgments

I greatly appreciate the diligent and generous contributions of a number of people, without whose assistance this book would have been much the poorer-or wouldn't even have been completed at all. First, special thanks to Trish Reader for encouragement all the way through, sound business analysis advice, and feedback on various drafts.

I am deeply indebted to all my reviewers, especially those who heroically read and commented cover to cover: to Roxanne Miller, for her deep understanding of what all business analysts will look for in this book, and for keeping me (relatively) honest on analysis techniques; and to Lydia Ash, for her expertise on testing but also countless invaluable suggestions on almost everything. I appreciate the feedback and suggestions of Robert Posener for scrutinizing the text with the all-seeing eye of the consummate project manager; Craig Malone on development methodologies (especially agile matters); Marc Munro for his database expertise on the information and data entity patterns; security guru Eric Fitzgerald on access control; and accessibility experts Annuska Perkins, Norm Hodne, Ramkumar Subramanian, and Laura Ruby. Finally, thanks to Shanno Sanders for perceptive insights on the overall direction of the book. Sometimes I have rashly persisted in disregarding their advice, for which I assume full responsibility-as I do for all errors that remain.

I am grateful to Karl Wiegers for contributing such a generous Foreword, and for the early encouragement that was the nudge I needed to write this book.

I'd like to thank everyone at Microsoft Press, especially acquisitions editor Ben Ryan for his faith in the concept, and editors Devon Musgrave and Maria Gargiulo for their never-failing patience, their good-natured reactions to even the quirkiest of my ideas, and their painstaking copy editing.

Finally, this book could never have been written at all if not for the innumerable people who have contributed to my professional experience over the years. The most valuable have been those at the two extremes of the spectrum: the excellent, from whom I've learned so much about how to specify and develop good systems; and the inept, whose creativity in finding ways to do things wrong is an education in itself. Thanks to you all.

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