CSC291- Software Engineering Concepts

(SPRING 2024)

Lecture 7
Requirements
Engineering
Process
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Objectives

Requirement Engineering Process

• Feasibility studies
• Requirements elicitation and analysis
• Requirements validation
• Requirements management
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Requirements Engineering

“Requirement Engineering (RE) is the science and

discipline concerned with analyzing and documenting
requirements.”
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Requirements Engineering Process

Goal of RE Process  to create and maintain a system
requirement document.

RE processes may Include four high-level activities

 Assessing whether the system is useful to business

and customers (Feasibility Study)
 Discovering requirements (elicitation and analysis)
 Converting these requirements into some standard
form (specification).
 Checking that the requirements define the system that
the customer wants (validation)
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The Requirements Engineering Process

Requirements
Feasibility
elicitation and
stud y
anal ysis
Requirements
specification

Feasibility Requirements
report validation

System
models

User and system

requirements

Requirements
document
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Feasibility Study
• A feasibility study decides whether or not the proposed system
is worth implementing.

• A feasibility study is short, focused study that take place early

in the RE Process
• Does the system contributes to organizational objectives?
• Can the system be implemented within schedule and
budget using current technology?
• Can the system be integrated with other systems that are
used?

• If the answer to any of these questions is no, you should

probably not go ahead with the project.
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Feasibility Study Implementation

Carrying out feasibility study involves
• Information assessment (what is required)
• Information collection
• Report writing

* Questions for people in the organisation

• What if the system wasn’t implemented?
• What are current process problems?
• How will the proposed system help?
• What will be the integration problems?
• Is new technology needed? What skills?
• What facilities must be supported by the proposed system?
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Feasibility Study Implementation

In feasibility study you may consult information sources such as

• Managers of department where the system will be used

• Software engineers who are familiar with the type of proposed
system
• Technology experts
• End user of system

Should complete a feasibility study in two or three weeks

• Once you have information  write feasibility report
• Make a recommendation  whether or not the system should
continue
• In a report  you may propose changes to scope ,budget and
schedule of the system.
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Requirement Elicitation and Analysis

• Sometimes called requirement discovery.

• Involves technical staff (software engineers) working with

customers to find out about the
• application domain
• the services that the system should provide and
• the system’s operational constraints.

May involve a variety of people in an organization

• End-users, managers, engineers involved in maintenance,
domain experts etc. These are called stakeholders
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Requirement Elicitation and Analysis

Process Activities
Requirements discovery
• Interacting with stakeholders to discover their requirements.

Requirements classification and organization

• Groups related requirements and organizes them into
coherent clusters.

Prioritization and negotiation

• Prioritizing requirements and resolving requirements conflicts
through negotiation.

Requirements documentation(Specification)
• Requirements are documented.
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Requirements Elicitation and Analysis Process

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Problems of Requirements Analysis

Understanding stakeholder requirements is difficult for
several reasons

• Stakeholders don’t know what they really want.

• Stakeholders express requirements in their own terms.
• Different stakeholders may have conflicting requirements.
• Organizational and political factors may influence the
system requirements.
• The requirements change during the analysis process.
New stakeholders may emerge and the business
environment change.
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Techniques of Requirement Discovery

Interview:
• Formal or informal interviews with the system stakeholders
• In this, the RE team puts questions to stakeholders about the
system that they currently use and the system to be
developed.

• There are two types of interview

• Closed interviews: where the stakeholders answer a pre-
defined set of questions.

• Open interviews: in which there is no pre-defined agenda

and a range of issues are explored with stakeholders.
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Scenarios
• People usually find it easier to relate to real-life examples rather than

abstract descriptions.
• Scenarios are real-life examples of how a system can be used.

• Through Scenario, users can understand and criticize….how they

might interact with a software system.

• Requirement engineers can use the information gained from this

discussion to formulate the actual system requirements.

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Scenarios

They should include:

• A description of the starting situation

• A description of the normal flow of events
• A description of what can go wrong
• Information about other concurrent activities
• A description of the state when the scenario finishes.
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LIBSYS Scenario
Initial assumption: The user has logged on to the LIBSYS system and has located the
journal containing the copy of the article.
Normal: The user selects the article to be copied. He or she is then prompted by the
system to either provide subscriber information for the journal or to indicate how they
will pay for the article. Alternative payment methods are by credit card or by quoting an
organisational account number.
The user is then asked to fill in a copyright form that maintains details of the transaction
and they then submit this to the LIBSYS system.
The copyright form is checked and, if OK, the PDF version of the article is downloaded
to the LIBSYS working area on the user’s computer and the user is informed that it is
available. The user is asked to select a printer and a copy of the article is printed. If the
article has been flagged as ‘print-only’ it is deleted from the user’s system once the user
has confirmed that printing is complete.
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LIBSYS Scenario
What can go wrong: The user may fail to fill in the copyright form correctly. In this
case, the form should be re-presented to the user for correction. If the resubmitted form is
still incorrect then the user’s request for the article is rejected.
The payment may be rejected by the system. The user’s request for the article is rejected.
The article download may fail. Retry until successful or the user terminates the session.
It may not be possible to print the article. If the article is not flagged as ‘print-only’ then it
is held in the LIBSYS workspace. Otherwise, the article is deleted and the user’s account
credited with the cost of the article.
Other activities: Simultaneous downloads of other articles.
System state on completion: User is logged on. The downloaded article has been deleted
from LIBSYS workspace if it has been flagged as print-only.
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Use Cases
• Use cases are a scenario-based technique for requirement elicitation

• Which identifies the actors in an interaction and describes the

interaction itself.

• A set of use cases should describe all possible interactions with the
system.

• Sequence diagrams may be used to add detail to use cases by

showing the sequence of event processing in the system .
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LIBSYS Use Cases

Article search

Library Article p rin ting

User

User ad m inistratio n Library

Staff

Su pp lier Catalog u e serv ices

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Social and Organizational Factors

• Software systems do not exist in isolation – they are used

in a social and organizational context.

• This can influence or even dominate the system

requirements.

• Good analysts must be sensitive to these factors.

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Ethnography

• is the study of people in their natural setting, involves the

analyst actively or passively participating in the normal
activities of the users over an extended period and collecting
information on the operations being performed.

• In practice, ethnography is particularly effective when the

need for a new system is a result of existing problems
with processes and procedures.

• These techniques are especially useful when addressing

contextual factors such as usability
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Prototyping
• Providing stakeholders with prototypes of the system to support the
investigation of possible solutions is an effective way to gather
detailed information and relevant feedback

• This technique is particularly useful when developing human-

computer interfaces, or where the stakeholders are unfamiliar with
the available solutions.
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Elicitation Workshops

Requirement analyst frequently facilitates elicitation

workshops. The following guidelines are followed during
elicitation workshops.

• Stay in scope
• Time box discussions
• Keep team small and select appropriate members
• Keep everyone engaged
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Brainstorming

• is a process where participants from different

stakeholder groups engage in informal discussion to
rapidly generate as many ideas as possible without
focusing on any one in particular.

• One of the advantages in using brainstorming is that it

promotes freethinking and expression, and allows the
discovery of new and innovative solutions to existing
problems.
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Questionnaires
Questionnaires are mainly used during the early stages of
requirements elicitation and may consist of open and/or
closed questions.

Gather information from many users (statistical indications,

views, opinions)

Questions must be focused to avoid gathering large

amounts of redundant and irrelevant information.
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Requirements Validation

• Concerned with demonstrating that the requirements

define the system that the customer really wants.

• Requirements error costs are high so validation is very

important

• Fixing a requirements error after delivery may cost up to

100 times the cost of fixing an implementation error.
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Requirements Checking

Checks include

• Validity. Does the system provide the functions which

best support the customer’s needs?
• Consistency. Are there any requirements conflicts?
• Completeness. Are all functions required by the
customer included?
• Realism. Can the requirements be implemented given the
available budget and technology?
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Requirements Validation Techniques

• Requirements reviews:
• Systematic manual analysis of the requirements(by a team of
reviewers) who check for error and inconsistencies.

• Prototyping:
• Using an executable model of the system to check
requirements.

• Test-case generation:
• Developing tests for requirements to check testability.
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Requirements Management

• Requirements management is the process of managing

changing requirements during the requirements engineering
process and system development.

• New requirements emerge during the process as business

needs change and a better understanding of the system is
developed
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Requirements Evolution

Initial Changed
understanding understanding
of problem of prob lem

Initial Changed
requirements requirements

Time
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Requirements Change Management

• Should be apply to all proposed changes to the requirements.

• There are three principal stages to change management

process:

• Problem analysis: Discuss requirements problem and

propose change

• Change analysis and costing: Assess effects of change on

other requirements;

• Change implementation: Modify requirements document

and other documents to reflect change.
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Change Management

Identified Revised
problem Problem analysis and Change analysis Change requirements
change specification and costing implementation
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Key Points

• The requirements engineering process includes a

feasibility study, requirements elicitation and analysis,
requirements specification and requirements
management.

• Requirements elicitation and analysis is iterative involving

domain understanding, requirements collection,
classification, structuring, prioritization and validation.

• Systems have multiple stakeholders with different

requirements.
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Key Points

• Social and organization factors influence system

requirements.

• Requirements validation is concerned with checks for

validity, consistency, completeness, realism and
verifiability.

• Requirements management includes planning and

change management.
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Chapter Reading
• Chapter 4, Requirement Engineering,
Software Engineering by Ian Sommerville