The document discusses requirements engineering and defines it as the process of establishing the services customers require from a system while considering the system's constraints. It involves investigating and describing the problem domain and requirements, and designing and documenting characteristics for a solution system to meet those requirements. The key activities of requirements engineering are requirements elicitation, analysis, specification, and validation. The document emphasizes that requirements engineering is important because defects are more costly to fix the later they are found in the development process. It also outlines characteristics of excellent requirements and stages of a requirements development process.