Requirements engineering

Requirements engineering (RE) refers to the process of formulating, documenting and maintaining software requirements^[1] and to the subfield of Software Engineering concerned with this process.

The first use of the term 'requirements engineering' was probably in 1979 in a TRW technical report ^[2] but did not come into general use until the 1990s with the publication of an IEEE Computer Society tutorial ^[3] and the establishment of a conference series on requirements engineering.

In the waterfall model,^[4] requirements engineering is presented as the first phase of the development process. Later software development methods, including the Rational Unified Process, Extreme Programming and Scrum assume that requirements engineering continues through the lifetime of a system.

Alan M. Davis maintains an extensive bibliography of requirements engineering.^[5]

Requirements engineering activities

The activities involved in requirements engineering vary widely, depending on the type of system being developed and the specific practices of the organization(s) involved.^[6] These may include:

1. Requirements inception or requirements elicitation -
2. Requirements identification - identifying new requirements
3. Requirements analysis and negotiation - checking requirements and resolving stakeholder conflicts
4. Requirements specification (Software Requirements Specification) - documenting the requirements in a requirements document
5. System modeling - deriving models of the system, often using a notation such as the Unified Modeling Language
6. Requirements validation - checking that the documented requirements and models are consistent and meet stakeholder needs
7. Requirements management - managing changes to the requirements as the system is developed and put into use

These are sometimes presented as chronological stages although, in practice, there is considerable interleaving of these activities.

Requirements engineering tools

Some links to the tools

Criticism

Some recent research suggests that software requirements are often an illusion misrepresenting design decisions as requirements in situations where no real requirements are evident.^[7]

References