Chapter 4 – Requirements Engineering

Software Engineering
Dr. Yahya Esmail Al-Ashmori
Ph.D. in Information Technology (IT)
Email: [email protected]
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Requirements engineering

 The process of establishing the services that a customer

requires from a system and the constraints under which
it operates and is developed.

 The system requirements are the descriptions of the

system services and constraints that are generated
during the requirements engineering process.

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 What is a requirement?

It may range from a high-level abstract statement

of a service or of a system constraint to a detailed
mathematical functional specification.
 This is inevitable as requirements may serve a dual function
▪ May be the basis for a bid for a contract - therefore must
be open to interpretation;

▪ May be the basis for the contract itself - therefore must

be defined in detail;

▪ Both these statements may be called requirements.

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 Types of requirement

User requirements
▪ Statements in natural language plus diagrams of the
services the system provides and its operational
constraints. Written for customers.
System requirements
▪ A structured document setting out detailed descriptions of
the system’s functions, services and operational
constraints. Defines what should be implemented so may
be part of a contract between client and contractor.
User and system requirements

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Readers of different types of requirements
specification

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System stakeholders

Any person or organization who is affected by the

system in some way and so who has a legitimate
interest

Stakeholder types
▪ End users

▪ System managers

▪ System owners

▪ External stakeholders 7
Stakeholders in the Mentcare system

 Patients whose information is recorded in the system.

 Doctors who are responsible for assessing and
treating patients.
 Nurses who coordinate the consultations with doctors
and administer some treatments.
 Medical receptionists who manage patients’
appointments.
 IT staff who are responsible for installing and
maintaining the system.

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Stakeholders in the Mentcare system

 A medical ethics manager who must ensure that the

system meets current ethical guidelines for patient
care.
 Health care managers who obtain management
information from the system.
 Medical records staff who are responsible for
ensuring that system information can be maintained
and preserved, and that record keeping procedures
have been properly implemented.

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Functional and non-functional requirements

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Functional and non-functional requirements

Functional requirements
▪ Statements of services the system should provide, how
the system should react to particular inputs and how the
system should behave in particular situations.
▪ May state what the system should not do.
Non-functional requirements
▪ Constraints on the services or functions offered by the
system such as timing constraints, constraints on the
development process, standards, etc.
▪ Often apply to the system as a whole rather than
individual features or services.
Domain requirements
▪ Constraints on the system from the domain of operation
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Functional requirements

Describe functionality or system services.

Depend on the type of software, expected users
and the type of system where the software is
used.
Functional user requirements may be high-level
statements of what the system should do.
Functional system requirements should describe
the system services in detail.

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Mentcare system: functional requirements

A user shall be able to search the appointments

lists for all clinics.
The system shall generate each day, for each
clinic, a list of patients who are expected to
attend appointments that day.
Each staff member using the system shall be
uniquely identified by his or her 8-digit employee
number.

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 Requirements imprecision

Problems arise when functional requirements are

not precisely stated.
Ambiguous requirements may be interpreted in
different ways by developers and users.
Consider the term ‘search’ in requirement 1
▪ User intention – search for a patient name across all
appointments in all clinics;
▪ Developer interpretation – search for a patient name in
an individual clinic. User chooses clinic then search.

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 Requirements completeness and
consistency
In principle, requirements should be both complete
and consistent.
Complete
▪ They should include descriptions of all facilities required.
Consistent
▪ There should be no conflicts or contradictions in the
descriptions of the system facilities.
In practice, because of system and environmental
complexity, it is impossible to produce a complete
and consistent requirements document.
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Non-functional requirements

These define system properties and constraints

e.g. reliability, response time and storage
requirements. Constraints are I/O device
capability, system representations, etc.
Process requirements may also be specified
mandating a particular IDE, programming
language or development method.
Non-functional requirements may be more critical
than functional requirements. If these are not met,
the system may be useless.
Integrated development environment (IDE) 16
Types of nonfunctional requirement

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Non-functional requirements implementation

 Non-functional requirements may affect the overall

architecture of a system rather than the individual
components.
▪ For example, to ensure that performance requirements are met,
you may have to organize the system to minimize communications
between components.
 A single non-functional requirement, such as a security
requirement, may generate a number of related functional
requirements that define system services that are
required.
▪ It may also generate requirements that restrict existing
requirements.

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 Non-functional classifications
Product requirements
▪ Requirements which specify that the delivered product
must behave in a particular way e.g. execution speed,
reliability, etc.
Organisational requirements
▪ Requirements which are a consequence of organisational
policies and procedures e.g. process standards used,
implementation requirements, etc.
External requirements
▪ Requirements which arise from factors which are external
to the system and its development process e.g.
interoperability requirements, legislative requirements, etc.
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Examples of nonfunctional requirements in the
Mentcare system

Product requirement
The Mentcare system shall be available to all clinics during normal
working hours (Mon–Fri, 0830–17.30). Downtime within normal
working hours shall not exceed five seconds in any one day.

Organizational requirement
Users of the Mentcare system shall authenticate themselves using
their health authority identity card.

External requirement
The system shall implement patient privacy provisions as set out in
HStan-03-2006-priv.

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 Goals and requirements
Non-functional requirements may be very difficult to
state precisely and imprecise requirements may be
difficult to verify.
Goal
▪ A general intention of the user such as ease of use.
Verifiable non-functional requirement
▪ A statement using some measure that can be objectively
tested.
Goals are helpful to developers as they convey the
intentions of the system users.
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Usability requirements

The system should be easy to use by medical

staff and should be organized in such a way that
user errors are minimized. (Goal)
Medical staff shall be able to use all the system
functions after four hours of training. After this
training, the average number of errors made by
experienced users shall not exceed two per hour
of system use. (Testable non-functional
requirement)

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Metrics for specifying nonfunctional requirements
Property Measure
Speed Processed transactions/second
User/event response time
Screen refresh time
Size Mbytes
Number of ROM chips
Ease of use Training time
Number of help frames
Reliability Mean time to failure
Probability of unavailability
Rate of failure occurrence
Availability
Robustness Time to restart after failure
Percentage of events causing failure
Probability of data corruption on failure
Portability Percentage of target dependent statements
Number of target systems 23