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User’s manual as a requirements specification: case studies

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Abstract

This paper argues that a user’s manual makes an excellent software requirements specification. It describes several experiences, including one in industry, of writing user’s manuals as requirements specifications. Finally, it discusses several lessons learned from the experiences.

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Notes

  1. The focus of building a CBS is on writing the software. Hence, often we forget that we are dealing with a whole system and talk about developing software. Moreover, as we give requirements for a CBS, we also need to give requirements for the software component in what is known as a software requirement specification (SRS). In this paper, fully cognizant of the necessity to deal with the whole system, we often use “system” and its “software” interchangeably, particularly since the part of the system that is most malleable is the software.

  2. To avoid the clumsy “he or she” construction, which in turn avoids using plural “they” for singular “everybody”, any unspecified person on the customer’s or user’s side of the game is “he” and any unspecified person on the analyst’s or implementer’s side of the game is “she”.

  3. Appearances can be deceiving. Berry once gave a talk about flo to an audience that included Brian Kernighan, an author of pic. Berry asked Kernighan if this approach was used to design and implement pic. Kernighan replied, “No”.

  4. In each case an actual metric is compared with an expected metric, the expected metric is based on the company’s past history with projects of similar size and complexity. There is no way of knowing exactly what the other way would have cost short of doing the project twice—and no one is going to do that—with carefully selected skill-balanced groups.

  5. Isn’t that how all bugs show up?!?

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Acknowledgements

The authors thank the anonymous referees of earlier versions of this paper for incisive, demanding comments. Berry was supported in parts by a University of Waterloo Startup Grant and by NSERC grant NSERC-RGPIN227055-00.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. School of Computer Science, University of Waterloo, Waterloo, Ontario, N2L 3G1, Canada

    D. M. Berry, K. Daudjee, J. Dong, I. Fainchtein, M. A. Nelson, T. Nelson & L. Ou

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Correspondence to D. M. Berry.

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Berry, D.M., Daudjee, K., Dong, J. et al. User’s manual as a requirements specification: case studies. Requirements Eng 9, 67–82 (2004). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00766-003-0181-1

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