Chapter 4 – Requirements Engineering

Topics covered
• Functional and non-functional requirements
• Requirements engineering processes
• Requirements elicitation
• Requirements specification
• Requirements validation
• Requirements change
Requirements engineering
• The process of establishing the services that acustomer
requires from a system and the constraints under which it
operates and is developed.
• The system requirements are the descriptions of the
system services and constraints that are generated
during the requirements engineering process.
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 What is the 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.

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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.

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User and system requirements

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Readers of different types of requirements
specification

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System stakeholders
• Any person or organization who is affected by the
system in some way and so who has a legitimate interest
• Stakeholder types
▪ End users
▪ System managers
▪ System owners
▪ External stakeholders

Stakeholders in the Mentcare system

• Patients whose information is recorded in the system.
• Doctors who are responsible for assessing and treating
patients.
• Nurses who coordinate the consultations with doctors
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 and administer some treatments.
• Medical receptionists who manage patients’
appointments.
• IT staff who are responsible for installing and maintaining
the system.
• 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.

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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

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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.
Mentcare system: functional requirements
• 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
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 that day.
• Each staff member using the system shall be uniquely
identified by his or her 8-digit employee number.

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.
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Types of nonfunctional requirement

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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.

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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.

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Examples of nonfunctional requirements in the
Mentcare system

Product requirement
The Mentcare system 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 Mentcare 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.

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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.

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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)

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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

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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.

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
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 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.
• Interviewers need to be open-minded without pre-
conceived ideas of what the system should do
• You need to prompt the use to talk about the system by
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 suggesting requirements rather than simply asking them
what they want.

Problems with interviews

• Application specialists may use language to describe
their work that isn’t easy for the requirements engineer to
understand.
• 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.

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Stories and scenarios
• Scenarios and user stories are real-life examples of how
a system can be used.
• Stories and scenarios are a description of how a system
may be used for a particular task.
• Because they are based on a practical situation,
stakeholders can relate to them and can comment on
their situation with respect to the story.
Scenarios
• A structured form of user story
• Scenarios should include
▪ A description of the starting situation;
▪ A description of the normal flow of events;
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 ▪ A description of what can go wrong;
▪ Information about other concurrent activities;
▪ A description of the state when the scenario finishes.

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 (see Ch.5).
• UML sequence diagrams may be used to add detail to
use-cases by showing the sequence of event processing
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 in the system.
Use cases for the Mentcare system

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Users of a requirements document

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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 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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