Requirements Engineering

Why

To define, refine, document and maintain requirements throughout a project.

How

Requirements can be elicited through various methods. Developers typically progress from an initial, high-level overview of a system to a detailed description of its behavioural and performance requirements. At each iteration, requirements are refined. To ensure completeness, the set of requirements can be divided into the different viewpoints, for example functional, operational, safety, security, and privacy.

Ingredients

• An understanding of the levels of development: functional specification, high-level design, low-level design, detailed design or source code.

• Differing viewpoints,

• Grice’s maxims: be brief, be relevant, be polite, and be informative.

Practice

As requirements list are essential in the documentation and process, ‘getting it right’ warrants time and effort. Some companies hire dedicated requirement engineers for this.