Chapter Three

Requirements engineering processes

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Requirements engineering processes

• Requirements engineering processes may include four high -level

activities
• Requirements elicitation;
• Requirements analysis;
• Requirements validation;
• Requirements management.

• In practice, RE is an iterative activity in which these processes are

interleaved.

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Requirements elicitation

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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.
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Requirements elicitation

• 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.

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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 may change.

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The requirements elicitation and analysis process

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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.

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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.

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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.

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Requirements specification

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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.

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Ways of writing a system requirements 30/10/2014

specification
Notation Description
Natural language The requirements are written using numbered sentences in natural language.
Each sentence should express one requirement.

Structured natural The requirements are written in natural language on a standard form or
language template. Each field provides information about an aspect of the
requirement.
Design description This approach uses a language like a programming language, but with more
languages 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 These notations are based on mathematical concepts such as finite-state
specifications 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

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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.

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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.
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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.
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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.

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 Example requirements for the insulin pump 30/10/2014

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.)

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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.
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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.

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A structured specification for an insulin pump

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A structured specification for an insulin pump

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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.
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Tabular specification of computation for an insulin 30/10/2014

pump
Condition Action

Sugar level falling (r2 < r1) CompDose = 0

Sugar level stable (r2 = r1) CompDose = 0

Sugar level increasing and rate of CompDose = 0

increase decreasing
((r2 – r1) < (r1 – r0))
Sugar level increasing and rate of CompDose =
increase stable or increasing round ((r2 – r1)/4)
((r2 – r1) ≥ (r1 – r0)) If rounded result = 0 then
CompDose =
MinimumDose

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Use cases

• Use-cases are a kind of scenario that are included in the UML.

• Use cases 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.

• UML 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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Use cases for the Mentcare system

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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.

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Users of a requirements document

Chapter 4 Requirements 28
Engineering
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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.
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The structure of a requirements 30/10/2014

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 Here, you describe the services provided for the user. The nonfunctional
definition 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.

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The structure of a requirements document

Chapter Description
System This should describe the functional and nonfunctional requirements in more detail.
requirements If necessary, further detail may also be added to the nonfunctional requirements.
specification 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.

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Requirements validation

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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

• 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?

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Requirements validation techniques

• Requirements reviews
• Systematic manual analysis of the requirements.

• 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 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.

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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?

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Requirements change

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Changing requirements
• The business and technical environment of the system always changes after installation.
• N ew h a rdware m ay b e i nt ro duce d , i t m ay b e n e c e s s ar y to i nte r fac e t h e syste m wi t h o t h e r syste ms ,
b u s i ne s s p r i o ri ti e s m ay c h a n ge ( wi t h co n s e q ue nt c h a nge s i n t h e syste m s u p p or t re q u i re d ), a n d n ew
l e g i s l ati on a n d re g u l at ions m ay b e i nt roduc e d t h at t h e syste m m u st n e c e s s a ri ly a b i d e by.

• The people who pay for a system and the users of that system are rarely the same people.
• Syste m c u stome rs i m p o s e re q u i re m ent s b e ca us e o f o rgani zati onal a n d b u d getar y co n st rai nts. T h e s e
m ay co nf l i c t wi t h e n d - u s e r re q u i re me nts a n d , af te r d e l i ve r y, n ew fe at u re s m ay h ave to b e a d d e d fo r
u s e r s u p p or t i f t h e syste m i s to m e et i t s go al s.

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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.
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Requirements evolution

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Requirements evolution

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Requirements management

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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 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.

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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.
• 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.

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Requirements change management

• D e c i d i n g i f a re q u i re m e nts c h a nge s h o u l d b e a c c e pte d
• P ro b l e m a n a l y s i s a n d c h a n g e s p e c i f i c a t i o n
• D u r i n g t h i s sta g e , t h e p ro b l e m o r t h e c h a n g e p ro p o s a l i s a n a l y ze d to c h e c k t h a t i t i s va l i d . T h i s a n a l y s i s i s
fe d b a c k to t h e c h a n g e r e q u e sto r w h o m ay r e s p o n d w i t h a m o r e s p e c i f i c r e q u i r e m e n t s c h a n g e p ro p o s a l , o r
d e c i d e to w i t h d ra w t h e r e q u e st .
• C h a n g e a n a l y s i s a n d c o st i n g
• T h e e f fe c t o f t h e p ro p o s e d c h a n g e i s a s s e s s e d u s i n g t ra c e a b i l i t y i n fo r m a t i o n a n d g e n e ra l k n o w l e d g e o f t h e
sy ste m r e q u i r e m e n t s . O n c e t h i s a n a l y s i s i s c o m p l e t e d , a d e c i s i o n i s m a d e w h e t h e r o r n o t to p ro c e e d w i t h
the requirements change.
• Change implementation
• T h e r e q u i r e m e n t s d o c u m e n t a n d , w h e r e n e c e s s a r y, t h e sy ste m d e s i g n a n d i m p l e m e n t a t i o n , a r e m o d i f i e d .
I d e a l l y, t h e d o c u m e n t s h o u l d b e o r ga n i ze d s o t h a t c h a n g e s c a n b e e a s i l y i m p l e m e n t e d .

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Requirements change management

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