About Us

A short introduction to Volere and the people behind it.

Who we are

Volere is the name given to a collection of requirements resources. In this case it covers the courses, templates, books, processes and so on. For simplicity’s sake, we will call this collective “techniques”. The techniques were developed be a common and easily accessible way of discovering requirements, communicating them and connecting them to solutions.

Volere is a trademarked brand owned by the Atlantic Systems Guild. The Guild is a London, Aachen and New York think tank, consultancy and training organisation with the objective of remaining at the forefront of systems development and engineering. The Guild includes your Volere authors, Suzanne Robertson and James Robertson, together with Tom DeMarco, Peter Hruschka, Tim Lister and Steve McMenamin. Please see the Atlantic Systems Guild web site for more on the Guild.

Provenance

Volere was introduced in 1995. Since then, the Volere approach to requirements has been used by thousands of projects. These range from the conventional commercial domains such as banking, insurance, and so on, to more exotic areas such as air traffic control, aviation, automotive engineering, real-time control of appliances, telephony, and many more. Volere is used in six of the seven continents—we do not know if any of the Antarctic enterprises use it.

The techniques were originally developed by James Robertson and Suzanne Robertson. Since their introduction, they have evolved as a result of research and application. We have continually introduced improvements as our clients have continued to push the requirements envelope.

Today there is a network of consultants, instructors and agents around the world that are available and qualified to help you get better value for your investment in requirements. Contact.

The Volere process was set down in the Robertson’s book Mastering the Requirements Process. The first edition was published by Addison-Wesley in 1999, and a second edition followed that in 2006. Prior to that, the Robertsons had combined on Complete Systems Analysis—the Workbook, the Textbook, the Answers, published by Dorset House. Most recently, James and Suzanne collaborated with their Atlantic Systems Guild partners to write Adrenaline Junkies and Template Zombies—Understanding Patterns of Project Behavior. This book won the 2009 Jolt Award for the best general computing book of the year.

Photos used on this site are by James Robertson, Suzanne Robertson, Tor Tveito, Wikimedia Commons, Karl Welsch.

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