A best practices approach to software requirements

In “No Silver Bullet: Essence and Accidents in Software Engineering” (The Mythical Man-Month, Addison-Wesley, 1995), Frederick Brooks warns, “The hardest single part of building a software system is deciding precisely what to build.” In numerous studies, software practitioners have traced software project failures to misunderstood or poorly articulated requirements. Practitioners estimate that the cost of fixing a defect injected in the requirements phase of development can be a staggering two orders of magnitude greater if the defect is not fixed until late in the process. Amid this alarming spectacle, Karl Wiegers gives us Software Requirements.