CHPTER TWO

Requirement Engineering Process

Mulugeta A.
Objective
 To describe the principal requirements engineering activities
 To introduce techniques for requirements elicitation and
analysis
 To describe requirements validation
 To discuss the role of requirements management in support of
other requirements engineering processes

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Requirements engineering processes
 The processes used for RE vary widely depending on the application
domain, the people involved and the organization developing the
requirements.
 Processes used to discover, analyse and validate system requirements
 However, there are a number of generic activities common to all processes
 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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A spiral view of the requirements engineering process

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Requirement Engineering process

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Feasibility studies
 A feasibility study decides whether or not the
proposed system is worthwhile
 A short focused study that checks
 If the system contributes to organizational objectives
 If the system can be engineered using current technology
and within budget
 If the system can be integrated with other systems that
are used

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Feasibility study implementation
 Based on information assessment (what is required),
information collection and report writing
 Questions for people in the organization
 What if the system wasn’t implemented?
 What are current process problems?
 How will the proposed system help?
 What will be the integration problems?
 Is new technology needed? What skills?
 What facilities must be supported by the proposed system?

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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 and analysis

 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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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 organization

 Groups related requirements and organizes them into coherent clusters.

 Prioritization and negotiation

 Prioritizing requirements and resolving requirements conflicts.

 Requirements specification
 Requirements are documented and input into the next round of the spiral.

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Problems of requirements elicitation and analysis

 Stakeholders don’t know what they really want.

 Stakeholders express requirements in their own terms.
 Different stakeholders may have conflicting requirements.
 Organizational and political factors may influence the
system requirements.
 The requirements change during the analysis process. New
stakeholders may emerge and the business environment
change.

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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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Stakeholders in the MHC-PMS
 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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Cont.
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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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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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.
 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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System models
 Different models may be produced during the requirements
analysis activity
 Requirements analysis may involve three structuring
activities which result in these different models
 Partitioning. Identifies the structural (part-of) relationships
between entities
 Abstraction. Identifies generalities among entities
 Projection. Identifies different ways of looking at a
problem

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Viewpoint-oriented elicitation
 Stakeholders represent different ways of looking
at a problem or problem viewpoints
 This multi-perspective analysis is important as
there is no single correct way to analyse system
requirements

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Banking ATM system
 The example used here is an auto-teller system which
provides some automated banking services
 Use a very simplified system which offers some
services to customers of the bank who own the system
and a narrower range of services to other customers
 Services include cash withdrawal, message passing
(send a message to request a service), ordering a
statement and transferring funds

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Autoteller viewpoints
 Bank customers
 Representatives of other banks
 Hardware and software maintenance engineers
 Marketing department
 Bank managers and counter staff
 Database administrators and security staff
 Communications engineers
 Personnel department
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Types of viewpoint
 Data sources or sinks
 Viewpoints are responsible for producing or consuming data. Analysis involves
checking that data is produced and consumed and that assumptions about the
source and sink of data are valid

 Representation frameworks
 Viewpoints represent particular types of system model. These may be compared
to discover requirements that would be missed using a single representation.
Particularly suitable for real-time systems

 Receivers of services
 Viewpoints are external to the system and receive services from it. Most suited to
interactive systems

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External viewpoints
 Natural to think of end-users as receivers of
system services
 Viewpoints are a natural way to structure
requirements elicitation
 It is relatively easy to decide if a viewpoint is
valid
 Viewpoints and services may be sued to structure
non-functional requirements

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Method-based analysis
 Widely used approach to requirements analysis.
Depends on the application of a structured method to
understand the system
 Methods have different emphases. Some are designed
for requirements elicitation, others are close to
design methods
 A viewpoint-oriented method (VORD) is used as an
example here. It also illustrates the use of viewpoints

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The VORD method

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VORD process model
 Viewpoint identification
 Discover viewpoints which receive system services and identify the
services provided to each viewpoint

 Viewpoint structuring
 Group related viewpoints into a hierarchy. Common services are provided
at higher-levels in the hierarchy

 Viewpoint documentation
 Refine the description of the identified viewpoints and services

 Viewpoint-system mapping
 Transform the analysis to an object-oriented design

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VORD standard forms

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Viewpoint identification

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Viewpoint service information

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Viewpoint data/control

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Viewpoint hierarchy

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Customer/cash withdrawal templates

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Scenarios
 Scenarios are descriptions of how a system is used in
practice
 They are helpful in requirements elicitation as
people can relate to these more readily than
abstract statement of what they require from a
system
 Scenarios are particularly useful for adding detail to
an outline requirements description.
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Scenario descriptions
 Consists of
 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.

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Event scenarios
 Event scenarios may be used to describe how a system
responds to the occurrence of some particular event such
as ‘start transaction’
 VORD includes a diagrammatic convention for event
scenarios.
 Data provided and delivered
 Control information
 Exception processing
 The next expected event

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Event scenario - start transaction

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Exception description
 Most methods do not include facilities for
describing exceptions
 In this example, exceptions are
 Timeout. Customer fails to enter a PIN within the
allowed time limit
 Invalid card. The card is not recognised and is returned
 Stolen card. The card has been registered as stolen and
is retained by the machine

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Use cases
 Use-cases are a scenario based technique in the UML which
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.
 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 MHC-PMS

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Social and organizational factors
 Software systems are used in a social and
organizational context. This can influence or even
dominate the system requirements
 Social and organizational factors are not a single
viewpoint but are influences on all viewpoints
 Good analysts must be sensitive to these factors but
currently no systematic way to tackle their analysis

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Example
 Consider a system which allows senior management to access

information without going through middle managers

 Managerial status. Senior managers may feel that they are too important

to use a keyboard. This may limit the type of system interface used

 Managerial responsibilities. Managers may have no uninterrupted time

where they can learn to use the system

 Organizational resistance. Middle managers who will be made redundant

may deliberately provide misleading or incomplete information so that

the system will fail

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Ethnography
A social scientist spends a considerable time observing
and analysing how people actually work.
 People do not have to explain or articulate their work.
 Social and organizational factors of importance may be
observed.
 Ethnographic studies have shown that work is usually
richer and more complex than suggested by simple
system models.

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Scope of ethnography
 Requirements that are derived from the way that people actually
work rather than the way In which process definitions suggest
that they ought to work.
 Requirements that are derived from cooperation and awareness
of other people’s activities.
 Awareness of what other people are doing leads to changes in the ways in
which we do things.

 Ethnography is effective for understanding existing processes but

cannot identify new features that should be added to a system.

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Focused ethnography
 Developed in a project studying the air traffic control
process
 Combines ethnography with prototyping
 Prototype development results in unanswered
questions which focus the ethnographic analysis.
 The problem with ethnography is that it studies
existing practices which may have some historical
basis which is no longer relevant.
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Ethnography and prototyping for requirements analysis

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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 management
 Requirements management is the process of managing
changing requirements during the requirements
engineering process and system development
 Requirements are inevitably incomplete and inconsistent
 New requirements emerge during the process as business
needs change and a better understanding of the system is
developed
 Different viewpoints have different requirements and these
are often contradictory

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Requirements change
 The priority of requirements from different
viewpoints changes during the development process
 System customers may specify requirements from a
business perspective that conflict with end-user
requirements
 The business and technical environment of the
system changes during its development

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Requirements evolution

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Enduring and volatile requirements

 Enduring requirements. Stable requirements derived

from the core activity of the customer organization.
 E.g. a hospital will always have doctors, nurses, etc. May be
derived from domain models

 Volatile requirements. Requirements which change

during development or when the system is in use.
 In a hospital, requirements derived from health-care policy

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Classification of requirements
 Mutable requirements
 Requirements that change due to the system’s environment

 Emergent requirements
 Requirements that emerge as understanding of the system develops

 Consequential requirements
 Requirements that result from the introduction of the computer system

 Compatibility requirements
 Requirements that depend on other systems or organizational processes

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Requirements management planning
 During the requirements engineering process, you have to
plan:
 Requirements identification
 How requirements are individually identified

 A change management process

 The process followed when analysing a requirements change

 Traceability policies
 The amount of information about requirements relationships that is maintained

 CASE tool support

 The tool support required to help manage requirements change

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Traceability
 Traceability is concerned with the relationships between
requirements, their sources and the system design
 Source traceability
 Links from requirements to stakeholders who proposed these
requirements

 Requirements traceability
 Links between dependent requirements

 Design traceability
 Links from the requirements to the design

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A traceability matrix

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CASE tool support
 Requirements storage
 Requirements should be managed in a secure, managed data
store

 Change management
 The process of change management is a workflow process
whose stages can be defined and information flow between
these stages partially automated

 Traceability management
 Automated retrieval of the links between requirements

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Requirements change management
 Should apply to all proposed changes to the
requirements
 Principal stages
 Problem analysis. Discuss requirements problem and propose
change
 Change analysis and costing. Assess effects of change on other
requirements
 Change implementation. Modify requirements document and
other documents to reflect change

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Requirements change management

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Key points
 The requirements engineering process includes a
feasibility study, requirements elicitation and analysis,
requirements specification and requirements management
 Requirements analysis is iterative involving domain
understanding, requirements collection, classification,
structuring, prioritisation and validation
 Systems have multiple stakeholders with different
requirements

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Key points
 Social and organization factors influence system
requirements
 Requirements validation is concerned with checks for
validity, consistency, completeness, realism and
verifiability
 Business changes inevitably lead to changing requirements
 Requirements management includes planning and change
management

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End of Chapter 2