Author news: Joy Beatty working on only one baby this year!

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Hello! Joy here. I was recently in the middle of my workday and I leaned back in my chair, looked around, and had to laugh. What I saw is the picture below. This is what my life has come to: a pile of Microsoft Press books! And it’s actually somewhat of a coincidence: I was doing research for the book I’m working on (the third edition of Software Requirements with Karl Wiegers), and these just so happened to be the important books for that chapter.

A photograph of four books: Sofware Requirements Second Edition, More About Software Requirements: Thorny Issues and Practical Advice, and Practial Project Initiation, all by Karl Wiegers, and Visual Models for Software Requirements, by Joy Beatty and Anthony Chen

Being a math and computer science major in college, I never thought that one of the most valuable skills for my career was writing. I am not talking about writing equations or code, but writing text. Yet here I am. A big part of my job at Seilevel is understanding best practices, creating new ideas for our consultants, testing them, and writing about them.

Karl Wiegers first authored Software Requirements over a decade ago, and it’s still the leading book in the requirements field. In fact, it’s the book I “grew up” on when I moved from being a software developer to a requirements engineer. And I’m excited that I now get the opportunity to work with Karl to co-author the new edition of the book, due out this summer.

We have some exciting things new to the third edition:

  • Trends we’ve seen over the last 10 years, including how the good requirements practices hold up, change, or don’t hold up at all on agile projects
  • Enhancements to the techniques and tools we suggest for elicitation and modeling
  • Suggestions for adapting requirements practices to specific types of projects
  • Recognition of the business analysis profession, including closer alignment to the IIBA BABOK

And so, this picture sums it up: a day in the life of Joy. The only thing missing to round out a full picture of my life is my daughter’s sippy cup, born last year during the writing of my first book, Visual Models for Software Requirements. This year I’m working on only one baby, though: Software Requirements , Third Edition.