Requirement

Engineering
Software Engineering

1 Presented By Dr. Huda Amin

Information Systems
[email protected]
Software Engineering - H.A.
Requirements Engineering

 Requirement: A function, constraint or other property that

the system must provide to fill the needs of the system’s
intended user(s).
 Engineering: implies that systematic and repeatable
techniques should be used.
 Requirement Engineering means that requirements for a
product are defined, managed and tested systematically.
 The process of finding out, analyzing, documenting and checking
system requirements and constraints
Requirements Classifications
 Types of requirement
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 User requirements (General):

 Statements, in a natural language plus diagrams, of what
services the system is expected to provide to system users
and the constraints under which it must operate.

 System requirements (Specific):

 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.
Chapter 4 Requirements engineering
 It shows how a user requirement may be
expanded into several system requirements:
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Chapter 4 Requirements engineering

Readers of different types of
requirements specification
 Functional and Non-Functional Requirements
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 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.

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 Functional requirements
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 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.
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 Functional requirements for the MHC-PMS
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1. A user shall be able to search the appointments lists for all

clinics.

2. The system shall generate each day, for each clinic, a list of
patients who are expected to attend appointments that day.

3. Each staff member using the system shall be uniquely

identified by his or her 8-digit employee number.

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 Requirements Imprecision
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 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.
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 Requirements Completeness and
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Consistency
 Complete
 All services required by the user should be defined (Complex
systems).
 Consistent
 There should be no conflicts or contradictions in the requirements
(Many stakeholders in a large system).
 For large, complex systems, it is practically impossible to achieve
requirements consistency and completeness Reasons:
 It is easy to make mistakes and omissions when writing specifications.
 There are many stakeholders in a large system.
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 Non-Functional Requirements
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 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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 Non-Functional Requirements
Implementation
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 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
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 Product Requirements

 These requirements specify or constrain the behavior of the

software. Examples include performance requirements on
how fast the system must execute and how much memory
it requires, reliability requirements that set out the
acceptable failure rate, security requirements, and
usability requirements.

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 Organizational requirements

 These requirements are broad system requirements derived from

policies and procedures in the customer’s and developer’s
organization.

 Examples include operational process requirements that define how

the system will be used, development process requirements that
specify the programming language, the development environment or
process standards to be used, and environmental requirements that
specify the operating environment of the system.

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 External Requirements

 Requirements which arise from factors which are external to the system
and its development process.

 These may include regulatory requirements that set out what must be
done for the system to be approved for use by a regulator, such as a
central bank; legislative requirements that must be followed to ensure
that the system operates within the law; and ethical requirements that
ensure that the system will be acceptable to its users and the general
public.
 Examples of Non-Functional
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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.

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Types of Non-Functional Requirements
 Goals and Requirements
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 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, the ability of the system
to recover from failure, or rapid user response.

 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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 Example: Usability Requirements
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 Goal
 The system should be easy to use by medical staff and should be
organized in such a way that user errors are minimized.

 Testable non-functional requirement

 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.
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 Metrics for Specifying Non-Functional
Requirements
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Chapter 4 Requirements engineering

Requirements Engineering Processes
 Requirements Engineering Processes
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 Feasibility study An estimate is made of whether the identified user needs may be
satisfied using current software and hardware technologies.
 The study considers whether the proposed system will be cost-effective from a business point
of view and if it can be developed within existing budgetary constraints.
 A feasibility study should be relatively cheap and quick. The result should inform the decision
of whether or not to go ahead with a more detailed analysis.
 Requirements Elicitation and Analysis: Draw out the requirements from stakeholders.
 This is the process of deriving the system requirements through observation of existing systems,
discussions with potential users and procurers, task analysis, and so on. This may involve the
development of one or more system models and prototypes. These help you understand the
system to be specified.
 Requirements specification
◼ Requirements are documented.

 Requirements Validation: Review the requirement specification for errors, ambiguities,

omissions, and conflicts.
 Requirements Management: Manage changing requirements.
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 Requirements Engineering Processes
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 In practice, RE is an iterative activity in which these processes are interleaved.

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 Requirements Elicitation and Analysis
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1. Requirements discovery
◼ Interacting with stakeholders to discover their requirements.
Domain requirements are also discovered at this stage.
2. Requirements classification and organisation
◼ Requirements are categorized and organized into subsets.
◼ Relations among requirements identified.
◼ Requirements reviewed for correctness.
3. Prioritization and negotiation
◼ Prioritising requirements based on customer needs and resolving
requirements conflicts.
◼ Negotiation about requirements, project cost and project timeline.

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 Requirements Elicitation and Analysis
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 It involves software engineers working with a range of system stakeholders to find out about
the application domain, the services that the system should provide and the system’s
operational constraints.
 Identify stakeholders
 Stakeholder can be “anyone who benefits in a direct or indirect way from the system
which is being developed”
Ex. Business manager, project manager, marketing people, software engineer, support
engineer, end-users, internal-external customers, consultants, maintenance engineer.
 Each one of them has different view of the system.
 Recognize multiple points of view
 Marketing group concern about feature and function to excite potential market. To sell
easily in the market.
 Business manager concern about feature built within budget and will be ready to meet
market.
 End user – Easy to learn and use.
 Support engineer – Maintainability of software.

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 Stakeholders in the MHC-PMS
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 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.

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 Stakeholders in the MHC-PMS
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 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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 Problems
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 Stakeholders are not completely sure of what is needed.

 Stakeholders express requirements in their own terms.

 Different stakeholders may have conflicting requirements.

 Stakeholders have a poor understanding of the capabilities and limitations

of the computing environment.

 Stakeholders omit detail that is believed to be obvious.

 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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 Interviewing
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 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.

 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.
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 Interviewing
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 Effective interviewers have two characteristics:

1. They are open-minded, avoid pre-conceived ideas about the requirements,
and are willing to listen to stakeholders. If the stakeholder comes up with
surprising requirements, then they are willing to change their mind about the
system.
2. They prompt the interviewee to get discussions going using a springboard
question, a requirements proposal, or by working together on a
prototype system. Saying to people ‘tell me what you want’ is unlikely to
result in useful information. They find it much easier to talk in a defined
context rather than in general terms.

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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
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 Scenario for Collecting Medical History in
MHC-PMS
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 Ethnography
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 A social scientist spends a considerable time observing and analysing

how people actually work.

 The value of ethnography is that it helps discover implicit system

requirements (Social and organisational factors) that reflect the actual
ways that people work, rather than the formal processes defined by the
organization.

 People often find it very difficult to articulate details of their work because
it is second nature to them. They understand their own work but may not
understand its relationship to other work in the organization.

 Ethnography is effective for understanding existing processes but cannot

identify new features that should be added to a system.
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Requirement Specification
Requirement Specification

 Requirements specification is the process of writing down the

user and system requirements in a requirements document.

 Ideally, the user and system requirements should be clear,

unambiguous, easy to understand, complete, and
consistent.

 In practice, this is difficult to achieve as stakeholders interpret

the requirements in different ways and there are often inherent
conflicts and inconsistencies in the requirements.
 It is used by software engineers as the starting
point for the system design.

 They may be used as part of the contract for the

implementation of the system and should therefore
be a complete and detailed specification of the
whole system.
Software Requirements Specification SRS

 The software requirements document is the official statement of what is

required of the system developers.

 It 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.

 It contains a complete information description, a detailed functional

description, a representation of system behavior, an indication of
performance requirements and design constraints, appropriate
validation criteria, and other information pertinent to requirements.
Requirement Validation
 Requirements Validation
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 A requirements review is a process where a group of people from

the system customer and the system developer read the
requirements document in detail and check for errors, anomalies,
and inconsistencies. Once these have been detected and recorded, it
is then up to the customer and the developer to negotiate how the
identified problems should be solved.

 The cost of fixing a requirements problem by making a system

change is usually much greater than repairing design or coding
errors.
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 Requirements checking
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 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. 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 Validation Techniques
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 Requirements reviews
 Systematic manual analysis of the requirements.
 Prototyping
 Using an executable model of the system to check if it
meets their real requirements.
 Test-case generation
 Developing tests for requirements to check testability.

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Requirements Management
 Requirements Management
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 Requirements management is the process of understanding and controlling

changes to requirements.
 New requirements emerge as a system is being developed and after it has gone
into use.
 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.
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Requirement Management Planning

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.
1. Requirements identification: Each requirement must be uniquely identified so that
it can be cross-referenced with other requirements and used in traceability
assessments.
2. A change management process: This is the set of activities that assess the impact
and cost of changes.
3. Traceability policies: These policies define the relationships between each
requirement and between the requirements and the system design that should be
recorded. The traceability policy should also define how these records should be
maintained.
4. Tool support: Requirements management involves the processing of large amounts
of information about the requirements. Tools that may be used range from
specialist requirements management systems to spreadsheets and simple database
systems.
 Requirements Change Management
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 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.
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 Source
49

 Sommerville, I., “Software Engineering”, 9th Edition,

Adison-Wesley.

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50 Thanks for Listening
Any Questions!

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