‫تسجيل محاضرة االحد‬

19/7

Chapter 2 Requirements engineering 1

 Chapter 3:
Requirements Engineering

Chapter 2 Requirements engineering 2

Requirements engineering

 Requirements engineering is the process of establishing

the services that the customer requires from a system
and the constraints under which it operates and is
developed.
 The requirements themselves are the descriptions of the
system services and constraints that are generated
during the requirements engineering process.

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Levels 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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 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
 Derived from the application domain of the system rather than from the
specific needs of system users (eg. Bank policy toward spouse employees).

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Functional requirements

 Describe functionality or system services.

 Depend on the type of software, expected users and the
type of system environment.
 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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Requirements imprecision (Ambiguous)

 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 below:
1. User intention – search for a patient name across all
appointments in all clinics;
2. Developer interpretation – search for a patient name in an
individual clinic. User chooses clinic then search.

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Requirements completeness and consistency

 In principle, requirements should be both complete and

consistent.
 Complete
 They should include descriptions of all facilities required.
 Consistent
 There should be no conflicts or contradictions in the descriptions
of the system facilities.
 For large and complex systems it practically impossible to achieve
requirements consistency and completeness. Because mistakes and
omissions may happen! And usually there are many stakeholders with
different and inconsistent needs!

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Non-functional requirements

 These define system properties and constraints e.g.

Reliability, availability, performance, security, response
time and storage requirements. Constraints are I/O
device capability, system representations, etc.
 Process requirements may also be specified
mandating a particular IDE (Integrated Development Environment),
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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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 o Training time
o 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 o Percentage of target dependent statements
o Number of target systems

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‫تسجيل محاضرة االثنين‬
20/07

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The software requirements document

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Agile methods and requirements

 Many agile methods argue that producing a

requirements document is a waste of time as
requirements change so quickly.
 The document is therefore always out of date.
 Methods such as XP use incremental requirements
engineering and express requirements as ‘user stories’
(discussed in Chapter 3 of the 9th Edition).
 This is practical for business systems but problematic for
systems that require a lot of pre-delivery analysis (e.g.
critical systems) or systems developed by several teams.

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Users of a requirements document

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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 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 (cont.)

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

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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.

Chapter 2 Requirements engineering 21

‫تسجيل محاضرة الثالثاء‬
21/07

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Guidelines for writing requirements

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Problems with natural language

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Requirements engineering processes

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Requirements elicitation and analysis

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Problems of requirements analysis

 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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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

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Requirements Checking

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Requirements Validation Techniques

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