Requirements Engineering: Advanced Topics

Christof Ebert, Vector Consulting Services

Total pages: 45

$29.00

Requirements engineering (RE) is a multidisciplinary field that blends software engineering, systems engineering, product management, and psychology. RE is the branch of systems engineering concerned with software-intensive systems' desired properties and constraints, the goals to be achieved in the software's environment, and assumptions about that environment. RE interfaces with software engineering in that it specifies the desired functions, quality attributes, and other properties of the software that is to be built or assembled. It interfaces with systems engineering in that it analyzes the software problems that exist in the sociotechnical system in which the software is to play a role. As a problem-analysis discipline, RE borrows from product management and psychology; it deals with goals to be achieved, the stakeholders who have these goals, and the problems to be solved within given business constraints. To summarize, RE maps needs to solutions. The underlying techniques evolve along the domains and their respective needs. RE research and the latest industrial results thus help tremendously in understanding what drives the software and systems engineering disciplines and their respective application domains. RE is a wonderful area for looking at how business drivers impact technical decisions and how individual people with their skills and competences make the difference.

Here, I've collected articles that provide details on a few relevant topics with sufficient depth to drive your own work in these domains. This selection of advanced articles shows the many facets RE has in practice and in research. I've selected these domains according to current and future relevance, not historic value. For example, Betty Cheng and Joanne Atlee's conference presentation "Research Directions in Requirements Engineering" provides a profound and comprehensive summary on trends that impact RE. They underline what research domains are relevant in the coming years. "Requirements Uncertainty: Influencing Factors and Concrete Improvements" describes how requirements are uncertain by nature, and shows how this uncertainty impacts software engineering and which techniques are available to manage it. "Initial Lessons Learned from the Definition and Implementation of a Platform Requirements Engineering Process at Intel Corporation," from Sarah Nesland highlights that products often depend on each other. This practical industry article shows how platform requirements are extracted and maintained over a system's evolution.

Stakeholders influence RE in many ways. In "Stakeholders in Global Requirements Engineering: Lessons Learned from Practice," Daniela Damian stresses that often critical stakeholders are overlooked or handled insufficiently. Her article looks into stakeholder management, specifically for distributed projects. Finally, in "Nonfunctional Requirements: From Elicitation to Conceptual Models" Luiz Marcio Cysneiros provides a comprehensive summary on how nonfunctional requirements such as security or maintainability are handled throughout the early development phases.

These articles on RE look into current hot topics and related research and how they are practically handled in industrial but also research settings. They stimulate your own search for best practices for the many new challenges in front of your software systems.

Keywords: software design, requirements elicitation, nonfunctional requirements, goal graphs, UML conceptual models, requirements engineering, stakeholders, global software engineering, client-developer relationships, outsourcing, research directions, process improvement, product life cycle, product management, platform requirements, requirements uncertainty

Table of Contents

Introduction

Christof Ebert, Vector Consulting Services

Research Directions in Requirements Engineering

Betty H.C. Cheng, Michigan State University

Joanne M. Atlee, University of Waterloo

In this paper, the authors review current requirements engineering (RE) research and identify future research directions suggested by emerging software needs. They highlight what they consider to be the "hot" current and future research topics, which aim to address RE needs for emerging systems of the future.

Requirements Uncertainty: Influencing Factors and Concrete Improvements

Christof Ebert and Jozef De Man, Alcatel

A key reason for project failures is insufficient management of changing requirements during all stages of the project life cycle. One root cause for changing requirements is requirements uncertainty. An experimental field study examines four underlying drivers for this problem.

Initial Lessons Learned from the Definition and Implementation of a Platform Requirements Engineering Process at Intel Corporation

Sarah Nesland, Intel

In many companies a communication divide exists between the disciplines of engineering, strategic planning, and marketing. To solve this problem, Intel's Desktop Platform Group (DPG) defined and implemented a platform requirements engineering system.

Stakeholders in Global Requirements Engineering: Lessons Learned from Practice

Daniela Damian, University of Victoria

Stakeholders have many needs in global requirements engineering and face several challenges in distributed interaction. Here, the authors provide practical advice to alleviate these challenges, as distilled from empirical studies of practice in global software engineering.

Nonfunctional Requirements: From Elicitation to Conceptual Models

Luiz Marcio Cysneiros and Julio Cesar Sampaio do Prado Leite

Nonfunctional requirements (NFRs) have been frequently neglected or forgotten in software design. The authors present a process to elicit NFRs, analyze their interdependencies, and trace them to functional conceptual models.

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