basics of requirements engineering

8/8/2019 Basics of Requirements Engineering

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BASICS OF REQUIREMENTS ENGINEERING

SUMMARY:

y There are four key activities in requirement engineering namely:1.Requirements elicitation:

Requirement elicitation is the action of discovering systemrequirements through

consultation with stakeholders whose sources could be system documents,domain knowledge, and

market studies .2.Requirements analysis and negotiation:

The ability to possess and analyze requirements andnegotiate with stake holders .

3.Requirements specification or documentation:Documenting agreed requirements at a certain level of

detail.4.Requirements validation:

The process of reviewing requirements for clarity,consistency and completeness.

y KEYAREAS WHERE THINGS CAN GO WRONG DURING REQUIREMENTSENGINEERING:

Project teams going by the assumption that every skilled programmer is also

proficient at interviewing customers and writing requirementsspecification which is a risky assumption and may not yield good results in all cases.

A Requirement Analyst needs to be trained on business,software engineering as

well as soft skills.

Effective coaching is required for the Requirement Analysts where they need to be

groomed on soft skills to build a good rapport with the customers and to be aware of

business domain to meet the customer requirements.

The requirement analysts get promoted to higher level based on their

performance.

Most of the Requirement Analysts do not focus on soft skills due to informationoverflow, but soft skills need to be developed to conduct requirement analysis

effectively.

Planning needs to be done effectively to ensure quality before design.Relying on

a series of meetings to perform requirement analysis is not sufficient.

INADEQUATEELICITATION:

Inadequate elicitation could be the result of factors such as ineffective


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meetings, not asking relevant or revealing questions, not scooping, not modeling or not

prioritizing.Inadequate elicitation yields poor results.key factors are:

1.INEFFECTIVEMEETINGS:To ensure progress,effective meetings with a

proper agenda must be planned and followed.

2.Communication is a key to success.Asking and providing relevant questionsand answers resolves most of the queries in the early stages of project.

3.Emphasis on what,how and when the things are required should be

laid.This happens when the analysts focus on 'elicitation'.

4.Modelling of requirements using adequate tools and techniques should be

done.

5.clear picture of scope may eliminate misunderstanding,overruns and poor

quality.

6.To transform user requirements into system requirement specifications, the

requirement analyst should act as a bridge between the end-users and the project

team.

7.There are no means to handle not prioritizing which cannot be overruled by

any design.

Missing Out Non-Functional Requirements:

reliability, scalability, installability, useability, availability and performance are non

functional requirements without which a project cannot be succeeded.

Missing assumptions,dependencies and constraints:

Identification, elicitation and documentation of assumptions, dependencies and

constraints is a vital part of requirement analysis which would guarantee customer

dissatisfaction.

Inadequate validation and results:

All the requirements must be validated and reviewed during early stages to avoid

conflictions and resolve defects.

Not measuring the quality of requirements:

Not measuring the quality of requirements affect the quality of subsequent phases.

It is a good practice to document the list of things that are out of scope. If not

documented, such features may creep in during the time of project execution or

acceptance testing.

Technical requirements should be considered by the requirements engineers with

respect to what the stakeholder want on technical perspective and address them in

design phase.


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basics of requirements engineering

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