BASICS OF REQUIREMENTS ENGINEERING

SUMMARY:

 There are four key activities in requirement engineering namely:

             1.Requirements elicitation:

                                         Requirement elicitation is the action of discovering system
requirements 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 and
negotiate 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.

 KEY AREAS WHERE THINGS CAN GO WRONG DURING REQUIREMENTS

ENGINEERING:

        Project teams going by the assumption that every skilled programmer is also
proficient at  interviewing customers  and                         writing requirements
specification 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 information
overflow, 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.
         INADEQUATE ELICITATION:
             Inadequate elicitation could be the result of factors such as ineffective
meetings, not asking relevant or revealing questions, not scooping, not modeling or not
prioritizing.Inadequate elicitation yields poor results.key factors are:
              1.INEFFECTIVE MEETINGS: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 questions
and 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.