SOFTWARE_ENGINEERING_Chapter_4_Requireme.pdf

SOFTWARE
ENGINEERING
Chapter 4 – Requirements Engineering

Topics covered
• Functional and non-functional requirements
• The software requirements document
• Requirements specification
• Requirements engineering processes
• Requirements elicitation and analysis
• Requirements validation
• Requirements management
Jul 2013 Chapter 4. Requirements engineering 2

Requirements engineering
• The process of establishing the services that the customer
requires from a system and the constraints under which it
operates and is developed.
• The requirements themselves are the descriptions of the
system services and constraints that are generated during
the requirements engineering process.

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.

Requirements abstraction (Davis)
“If a company wishes to let a contract for a large software development
project, it must define its needs in a sufficiently abstract way that a
solution is not pre-defined. The requirements must be written so that
several contractors can bid for the contract, offering, perhaps, different
ways of meeting the client organization’s needs. Once a contract has
been awarded, the contractor must write a system definition for the
client in more detail so that the client understands and can validate what
the software will do. Both of these documents may be called the
requirements document for the system.”

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

Readers of different types of requirements
specification

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

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.

Case study: MHC-PMS
• The MHC-PMS (Mental Health Care-Patient Management
System) is an information system that is intended for use
in clinics.
• It makes use of a centralized database of patient
information but has also been designed to run on a PC,
so that it may be accessed and used from sites that do
not have secure network connectivity.
• When the local systems have secure network access,
they use patient information in the database but they can
download and use local copies of patient records when
they are disconnected.

MHC-PMS goals
• To generate management information that allows health
service managers to assess performance against local
and government targets.
• To provide medical staff with timely information to support
the treatment of patients.

The organization of the MHC-PMS

MHC-PMS key features
• Individual care management
• Clinicians can create records for patients, edit the information in the
system, view patient history, etc. The system supports data
summaries so that doctors can quickly learn about the key problems
and treatments that have been prescribed.
• Patient monitoring
• The system monitors the records of patients that are involved in
treatment and issues warnings if possible problems are detected.
• Administrative reporting
• The system generates monthly management reports showing the
number of patients treated at each clinic, the number of patients who
have entered and left the care system, number of patients sectioned,
the drugs prescribed and their costs, etc.

MHC-PMS concerns
• Privacy
• It is essential that patient information is confidential and is never
disclosed to anyone apart from authorised medical staff and the
patient themselves.
• Safety
• Some mental illnesses cause patients to become suicidal or a
danger to other people. Wherever possible, the system should
warn medical staff about potentially suicidal or dangerous patients.
• The system must be available when needed otherwise safety may
be compromised and it may be impossible to prescribe the correct
medication to patients.

Functional requirements for the MHC-
PMS
• 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.

Requirements imprecision
• Problems arise when 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.

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, it is impossible to produce a complete and
consistent requirements document.

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.

Types of nonfunctional requirement

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.

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.

Examples of nonfunctional requirements
in the MHC-PMS
Product requirement
The MHC-PMS 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 MHC-PMS 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.

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.

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)

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

Domain requirements
• The system’s operational domain imposes requirements
on the system.
• For example, a train control system has to take into account the
braking characteristics in different weather conditions.
• Domain requirements be new functional requirements,
constraints on existing requirements or define specific
computations.
• If domain requirements are not satisfied, the system may
be unworkable.

Train protection system
• This is a domain requirement for a train protection
system:
• The deceleration of the train shall be computed as:
• Dtrain = Dcontrol + Dgradient
• where Dgradient is 9.81ms2 * compensated gradient/alpha and
where the values of 9.81ms2 /alpha are known for different types of
train.
• It is difficult for a non-specialist to understand the
implications of this and how it interacts with other
requirements.

Domain requirements problems
• Understandability
• Requirements are expressed in the language of the application
domain;
• This is often not understood by software engineers developing the
system.
• Implicitness
• Domain specialists understand the area so well that they do not
think of making the domain requirements explicit.

The software requirements document
• The software requirements document is the official
statement of what is required of the system developers.
• Should include both a definition of user requirements and
a specification of the system requirements.
• It is NOT a design document. As far as possible, it should
set of WHAT the system should do rather than HOW it
should do it.

Users of a requirements document

Requirements document variability
• Information in requirements document depends on type of
system and the approach to development used.
• Systems developed incrementally will, typically, have less
detail in the requirements document.
• Requirements documents standards have been designed
e.g. IEEE standard. These are mostly applicable to the
requirements for large systems engineering projects.

The structure of a requirements
document
Chapter Description
Preface This should define the expected readership of the document and describe
its version history, including a rationale for the creation of a new version
and a summary of the changes made in each version.
Introduction This should describe the need for the system. It should briefly describe the
system’s functions and explain how it will work with other systems. It
should also describe how the system fits into the overall business or
strategic objectives of the organization commissioning the software.
Glossary This should define the technical terms used in the document. You should
not make assumptions about the experience or expertise of the reader.
User requirements
definition
Here, you describe the services provided for the user. The nonfunctional
system requirements should also be described in this section. This
description may use natural language, diagrams, or other notations that are
understandable to customers. Product and process standards that must be
followed should be specified.
System architecture This chapter should present a high-level overview of the anticipated system
architecture, showing the distribution of functions across system modules.
Architectural components that are reused should be highlighted.

The structure of a requirements document
Chapter Description
System
requirements
specification
This should describe the functional and nonfunctional requirements in more detail.
If necessary, further detail may also be added to the nonfunctional requirements.
Interfaces to other systems may be defined.
System models This might include graphical system models showing the relationships between
the system components and the system and its environment. Examples of
possible models are object models, data-flow models, or semantic data models.
System evolution This should describe the fundamental assumptions on which the system is based,
and any anticipated changes due to hardware evolution, changing user needs,
and so on. This section is useful for system designers as it may help them avoid
design decisions that would constrain likely future changes to the system.
Appendices These should provide detailed, specific information that is related to the
application being developed; for example, hardware and database descriptions.
Hardware requirements define the minimal and optimal configurations for the
system. Database requirements define the logical organization of the data used
by the system and the relationships between data.
Index Several indexes to the document may be included. As well as a normal alphabetic
index, there may be an index of diagrams, an index of functions, and so on.

Requirements specification
• The process of writing down the user and system
requirements in a requirements document.
• User requirements have to be understandable by end-
users and customers who do not have a technical
background.
• System requirements are more detailed requirements and
may include more technical information.
• The requirements may be part of a contract for the system
development
• It is therefore important that these are as complete as possible.

Ways of writing a system requirements
specification
Notation Description
Natural language The requirements are written using numbered sentences in natural language.
Each sentence should express one requirement.
Structured natural
language
The requirements are written in natural language on a standard form or
template. Each field provides information about an aspect of the
requirement.
Design description
languages
This approach uses a language like a programming language, but with more
abstract features to specify the requirements by defining an operational
model of the system. This approach is now rarely used although it can be
useful for interface specifications.
Graphical notations Graphical models, supplemented by text annotations, are used to define the
functional requirements for the system; UML use case and sequence
diagrams are commonly used.
Mathematical
specifications
These notations are based on mathematical concepts such as finite-state
machines or sets. Although these unambiguous specifications can reduce
the ambiguity in a requirements document, most customers don’t understand
a formal specification. They cannot check that it represents what they want
and are reluctant to accept it as a system contract

Requirements and design
• In principle, requirements should state what the system
should do and the design should describe how it does
this.
• In practice, requirements and design are inseparable
• A system architecture may be designed to structure the
requirements;
• The system may inter-operate with other systems that generate
design requirements;
• The use of a specific architecture to satisfy non-functional
requirements may be a domain requirement.
• This may be the consequence of a regulatory requirement.

Natural language specification
• Requirements are written as natural language sentences
supplemented by diagrams and tables.
• Used for writing requirements because it is expressive,
intuitive and universal. This means that the requirements
can be understood by users and customers.

Guidelines for writing requirements
• Invent a standard format and use it for all requirements.
• Use language in a consistent way. Use shall for
mandatory requirements, should for desirable
requirements.
• Use text highlighting to identify key parts of the
requirement.
• Avoid the use of computer jargon.
• Include an explanation (rationale) of why a requirement is
necessary.

Problems with natural language
• Lack of clarity
• Precision is difficult without making the document difficult to read.
• Requirements confusion
• Functional and non-functional requirements tend to be mixed-up.
• Requirements amalgamation
• Several different requirements may be expressed together.

Example requirements for the insulin
pump software system
3.2 The system shall measure the blood sugar and deliver
insulin, if required, every 10 minutes. (Changes in blood
sugar are relatively slow so more frequent measurement
is unnecessary; less frequent measurement could lead to
unnecessarily high sugar levels.)
3.6 The system shall run a self-test routine every minute
with the conditions to be tested and the associated actions
defined in Table 1. (A self-test routine can discover
hardware and software problems and alert the user to the
fact the normal operation may be impossible.)

Structured specifications
• An approach to writing requirements where the freedom
of the requirements writer is limited and requirements are
written in a standard way.
• This works well for some types of requirements e.g.
requirements for embedded control system but is
sometimes too rigid for writing business system
requirements.

Form-based specifications
• Definition of the function or entity.
• Description of inputs and where they come from.
• Description of outputs and where they go to.
• Information about the information needed for the
computation and other entities used.
• Description of the action to be taken.
• Pre and post conditions (if appropriate).
• The side effects (if any) of the function.

A structured specification of a requirement
for an insulin pump

Tabular specification
• Used to supplement natural language.
• Particularly useful when you have to define a number of
possible alternative courses of action.
• For example, the insulin pump systems bases its
computations on the rate of change of blood sugar level
and the tabular specification explains how to calculate the
insulin requirement for different scenarios.

Tabular specification of computation for an
insulin pump
Condition Action
Sugar level falling (r2 < r1) CompDose = 0
Sugar level stable (r2 = r1) CompDose = 0
Sugar level increasing and rate of
increase decreasing
((r2 – r1) < (r1 – r0))
CompDose = 0
Sugar level increasing and rate of
increase stable or increasing
((r2 – r1) ≥ (r1 – r0))
CompDose =
round ((r2 – r1)/4)
If rounded result = 0 then
CompDose =
MinimumDose

Requirements engineering processes
• The processes used for RE vary widely depending on the
application domain, the people involved and the
organisation developing the requirements.
• However, there are a number of generic activities
common to all processes
• Requirements elicitation;
• Requirements analysis;
• Requirements validation;
• Requirements management.
• In practice, RE is an iterative activity in which these
processes are interleaved.

A spiral view of the requirements engineering
process

Requirements elicitation and analysis
• Sometimes called requirements elicitation or requirements
discovery.
• Involves technical staff 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 end-users, managers, engineers involved in
maintenance, domain experts, trade unions, etc. These
are called stakeholders.

Problems of requirements analysis
• Stakeholders don’t know what they really want.
• Stakeholders express requirements in their own terms.
• Different stakeholders may have conflicting requirements.
• Organisational and political factors may influence the
system requirements.
• The requirements change during the analysis process.
New stakeholders may emerge and the business
environment may change.

Requirements elicitation and analysis
• Software engineers work with a range of system
stakeholders to find out about the application domain, the
services that the system should provide, the required
system performance, hardware constraints, other
systems, etc.
• Stages include:
• Requirements discovery,
• Requirements classification and organization,
• Requirements prioritization and negotiation,
• Requirements specification.

The requirements elicitation and analysis
process

Process activities
• Requirements discovery
• Interacting with stakeholders to discover their requirements.
Domain requirements are also discovered at this stage.
• Requirements classification and organisation
• Groups related requirements and organises them into coherent
clusters.
• Prioritisation and negotiation
• Prioritising requirements and resolving requirements conflicts.
• Requirements specification
• Requirements are documented and input into the next round of the
spiral.

Problems of requirements elicitation
• Stakeholders don’t know what they really want.
• Stakeholders express requirements in their own terms.
• Different stakeholders may have conflicting requirements.
• Organisational and political factors may influence the
system requirements.
• The requirements change during the analysis process.
New stakeholders may emerge and the business
environment change.

Requirements discovery
• The process of gathering information about the required
and existing systems and distilling the user and system
requirements from this information.
• Interaction is with system stakeholders from managers to
external regulators.
• Systems normally have a range of stakeholders.

Stakeholders in the MHC-PMS
• 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.

Stakeholders in the MHC-PMS
• 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.

Interviewing
• Formal or informal interviews with stakeholders are part of
most RE processes.
• Types of interview
• Closed interviews based on pre-determined list of questions
• Open interviews where various issues are explored with
stakeholders.
• Effective interviewing
• Be open-minded, avoid pre-conceived ideas about the
requirements and are willing to listen to stakeholders.
• Prompt the interviewee to get discussions going using a
springboard question, a requirements proposal, or by working
together on a prototype system.

Interviews in practice
• Normally a mix of closed and open-ended interviewing.
• Interviews are good for getting an overall understanding
of what stakeholders do and how they might interact with
the system.
• Interviews are not good for understanding domain
requirements
• Requirements engineers cannot understand specific domain
terminology;
• Some domain knowledge is so familiar that people find it hard to
articulate or think that it isn’t worth articulating.

Exercise - Context
• Some supermarket offers their customers credit cards
(CC)
• A CC-approval department of this supermarket
• receive postal and online CC applications from their customers
• process applications and decide whether an application is
approved or not
• Issue CC or notify their customers
• An IT team is developing a computer-support system for
this department
• The IT team interview staff of the department to do
requirements elicitation

Exercise: Role playing games
• To make student groups of 5-6
• Students in each group play two main roles: supermarket
staff and IT system analyst
• Students playing the role of system analyst interview
students playing the role of staff
• Some points to consider
• Supermarket staff may not want to honestly describe the way the
process CC applications
• What do the system analysts obtain after the interview?

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

Scenario for collecting medical history in
MHC-PMS

Use cases
• Use-cases are a scenario based technique in the UML
which identify the actors in an interaction and which
describe the interaction itself.
• A set of use cases should describe all possible
interactions with the system.
• High-level graphical model supplemented by more
detailed tabular description (see Chapter 5).
• Sequence diagrams may be used to add detail to use-
cases by showing the sequence of event processing in
the system.

Use cases for the MHC-PMS

Ethnography
• A social scientist spends a considerable time observing
and analysing how people actually work.
• People do not have to explain or articulate their work.
• Social and organisational factors of importance may be
observed.
• Ethnographic studies have shown that work is usually
richer and more complex than suggested by simple
system models.

Scope of ethnography
• Requirements that are derived from the way that people
actually work rather than the way in which process
definitions suggest that they ought to work.
• Requirements that are derived from cooperation and
awareness of other people’s activities.
• Awareness of what other people are doing leads to changes in the
ways in which we do things.
• Ethnography is effective for understanding existing
processes but cannot identify new features that should be
added to a system.

Focused ethnography
• Developed in a project studying the air traffic control
process
• Combines ethnography with prototyping
• Prototype development results in unanswered questions
which focus the ethnographic analysis.
• The problem with ethnography is that it studies existing
practices which may have some historical basis which is
no longer relevant.

Ethnography and prototyping for
requirements analysis

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.

Requirements checking
• 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
available budget and technology
• Verifiability. Can the requirements be checked?

Requirements validation techniques
• Requirements reviews
• Systematic manual analysis of the requirements.
• Prototyping
• Using an executable model of the system to check requirements.
Covered in Chapter 2.
• Test-case generation
• Developing tests for requirements to check testability.

Requirements reviews
• Regular reviews should be held while the requirements
definition is being formulated.
• Both client and contractor staff should be involved in
reviews.
• Reviews may be formal (with completed documents) or
informal. Good communications between developers,
customers and users can resolve problems at an early
stage.

Review checks
• Verifiability
• Is the requirement realistically testable?
• Comprehensibility
• Is the requirement properly understood?
• Traceability
• Is the origin of the requirement clearly stated?
• Adaptability
• Can the requirement be changed without a large impact on other
requirements?

Testability
The system shall display the difference in salary between the
client and the world wide average for the same trade
 -- can't be tested because the average mentioned cannot be
determined (even though it exists).
Better:
The system shall display the difference in salary between the
client and the estimated world-wide average for the same
trade as published by the United Nations on its website
www…. at the time of the display....

Ambiguity
Better version:
Whenever all foreign players are absent from the area containing the
player's main character, the player may change the quality values of this
character, keeping the sum total of the quality values unchanged. The
PlayerQualityWindow, (see section 3.2.PQ) is used for this purpose.
Changes take effect four seconds after the “OK” button is pressed.
The player can decide the qualities of Encounter characters.
At any time? Probably not. Would have to test under all circumstances, many
not intended, incurring unnecessary expense, and producing a wrong result.

Prioritizing D-requirements
• 1. Essential? [essential] Every game character has
• the same set of qualities.
• 2. Otherwise: [desirable] Each area has a set of
• preferred qualities
• 3. Optional? [optional] The player’s character shall age
• with every encounter. The age rate can be
• provided at setup time. Its default is one year
• per encounter.

Completeness
• Begin Requirements
• The application shall display a video in stock when a title is entered
at the prompt, or “OUT” when not in stock
• The application shall display all of the store’s videos by any director
whose last name is entered at the prompt.
• 2.1 Sequencing shall be controlled by the forward arrow key.
• The application shall display all of the store’s videos by any actor
whose last name is entered at the prompt.
• 3.1 Sequencing shall be controlled by the forward arrow key.
• End Requirements
• Incomplete: specify how to “display” a video!
No omissions which compromise the stated

Error Conditions Handling in
Requirements
• Ex:
• A function that tells whether three numbers produce an equilateral
triangle (whose sides are all equal), an isosceles triangle
(containing exactly two equal sides) or a scalene triangle (a triangle
which is neither equilateral nor isosceles).
• More complete:
• A function that tells whether a triplet of numbers produces:
• (1) an equilateral triangle (whose sides are all greater than zero and
equal), in which case it outputs ‘E’ at the prompt, or
• (2) an isosceles triangle (whose sides are greater than zero, exactly two
of which are equal, and which form a triangle), in which case it outputs
‘I’ at the system, or
• (3) a scalene triangle (whose sides are all greater than zero, which form
a triangle, and which is neither equilateral nor isosceles), in which case
it outputs ‘S’ at the prompt, or
• (4) no triangle, in which case it outputs ‘N’ at the prompt.
How about illegal input (negative numbers,

Consistency
• Requirement 14. Only basic food staples shall be carried
by game characters
• . . . . . .
• Requirement 223. Every game character shall carry
water.
• . . . . . .
• Requirement 497. Flour, butter, milk and salt shall be
considered the only basic food staples.
No contradictions among requirements

Write a Detailed Requirement
• 1. Classify requirement as functional or non-functional
• IEEE SRS prompts for most non-functional
• select method for organizing functional requirements
• 2. Size carefully
• a functional requirement corresponds ± to a method
• too large: hard to manage
• too small: not worth tracking separately
• 3. Make trace-able if possible
• ensure suitable for tracking through design and implementation
• 4. Make testable
• sketch a specific test that establishes satisfaction

Write a Detailed Requirement (cont.)
• 5. Make sure not ambiguous
• ensure hard to misunderstand intention
• 6. Give the requirement a priority
• e.g., highest (“essential”); lowest (“optional”); neither (“desirable”)
• 7. Check that requirement set complete
• for each requirement, ensure all other necessary accompanying
requirements are also present
• 8. Include error conditions
• state what’s specifically required for non-nominal situations
• include programmer errors for critical places
• 9. Check for consistency
• ensure that each requirement does not contradict any aspect of any
other requirement

Requirements management
• Requirements management is the process of managing
changing requirements during the requirements
engineering process and system development.
• New requirements emerge as a system is being
developed and after it has gone into use.
• You need to keep track of individual requirements and
maintain links between dependent requirements so that
you can assess the impact of requirements changes. You
need to establish a formal process for making change
proposals and linking these to system requirements.

Changing requirements
• The business and technical environment of the system
always changes after installation.
• New hardware may be introduced, it may be necessary to interface
the system with other systems, business priorities may change
(with consequent changes in the system support required), and
new legislation and regulations may be introduced that the system
must necessarily abide by.
• The people who pay for a system and the users of that
system are rarely the same people.
• System customers impose requirements because of organizational
and budgetary constraints. These may conflict with end-user
requirements and, after delivery, new features may have to be
added for user support if the system is to meet its goals.

Changing requirements
• Large systems usually have a diverse user community,
with many users having different requirements and
priorities that may be conflicting or contradictory.
• The final system requirements are inevitably a compromise
between them and, with experience, it is often discovered that the
balance of support given to different users has to be changed.

Requirements evolution

Requirements management planning
• Establishes the level of requirements management detail that
is required.
• Requirements management decisions:
• Requirements identification Each requirement must be uniquely
identified so that it can be cross-referenced with other requirements.
• A change management process This is the set of activities that assess
the impact and cost of changes. I discuss this process in more detail in
the following section.
• Traceability policies These policies define the relationships between
each requirement and between the requirements and the system
design that should be recorded.
• Tool support Tools that may be used range from specialist requirements
management systems to spreadsheets and simple database systems.

Requirements change management
• Deciding if a requirements change should be accepted
• Problem analysis and change specification
• During this stage, the problem or the change proposal is analyzed to
check that it is valid. This analysis is fed back to the change requestor
who may respond with a more specific requirements change proposal,
or decide to withdraw the request.
• Change analysis and costing
• The effect of the proposed change is assessed using traceability
information and general knowledge of the system requirements. Once
this analysis is completed, a decision is made whether or not to proceed
with the requirements change.
• Change implementation
• The requirements document and, where necessary, the system design
and implementation, are modified. Ideally, the document should be
organized so that changes can be easily implemented.

Requirements change management

Summary
• Requirements for a software system set out what the
system should do and define constraints on its operation
and implementation.
• Functional requirements are statements of the services
that the system must provide or are descriptions of how
some computations must be carried out.
• Non-functional requirements often constrain the system
being developed and the development process being
used.
• They often relate to the emergent properties of the system
and therefore apply to the system as a whole.

Summary (cont.)
• The software requirements document is an agreed
statement of the system requirements. It should be
organized so that both system customers and software
developers can use it.
• The requirements engineering process is an iterative
process including requirements elicitation, specification
and validation.
• Requirements elicitation and analysis is an iterative
process that can be represented as a spiral of activities –
requirements discovery, requirements classification and
organization, requirements negotiation and requirements
documentation.

Summary (cont.)
• You can use a range of techniques for requirements
elicitation including interviews, scenarios, use-cases and
ethnography.
• Requirements validation is the process of checking the
requirements for validity, consistency, completeness,
realism and verifiability.
• Business, organizational and technical changes inevitably
lead to changes to the requirements for a software
system. Requirements management is the process of
managing and controlling these changes.

SOFTWARE_ENGINEERING_Chapter_4_Requireme.pdf

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