Software Requirements: Encapsulation, Quality, and Reuse describes how to make requirements, and their implementing code, easier to change through the use of Freedom methodology. Freedom reduces software life cycle costs by making requirements quickly adaptable to changing technology and business needs. This book examines the definition of requirements and explains how they can be encapsulated within so software engineers and analysts can understand the nature of the requirements. With the theoretical underpinnings established, the book reviews the Freedom Requirements process and details the individual tasks of the process in a how-to fashion, explaining relevant terminology, recording notations, and more.
Most requirements books today provide general-purpose guidance such as “involve the customer” and “make the requirements testable,” or document-specific techniques such as Use Cases. In spite of this breadth of coverage, several important topics are weakly, rarely, or never covered in requirements books. These topics include the effect of requirements on overall software quality (weakly covered), requirements reuse (rarely covered), and requirements encapsulation (never covered). As its title suggests, Software Requirements: Encapsulation, Quality, and Reuse strives to remedy these shortcomings.
This book is able to cover these additional topics because it focuses on the concepts and techniques of the Freedom approach to requirements. Freedom is a lightweight, customer-centric technical software development methodology originally developed for NASA’s Space Station Freedom Program. Freedom strives to meet customer needs for functionality by specifying requirements in an innovative manner that permits encapsulation of requirements in code objects for later ease of change. Requirements encapsulation in turn enables requirements reuse . Customer needs for quality are addressed by continuous emphasis on quality drivers throughout the development process. Direct participation of the customer, or a knowledgeable customer representative, is essential to the Freedom requirements process.
