Software Engineering - Old Questions

5. What do you mean by software requirement? Explain the requirements engineering process with example.

The requirement for a system are the descriptions of what the system should do - the services that it provides and the constraints on its operation. Requirement may range from a high-level abstract statement of a services or of a system constraint to detailed mathematical specification.

Requirement engineering process:

Requirement engineering is the process of defining, documenting and maintaining the requirements in the engineering design process. The requirement engineering process consists of the following activities:

Fig: The requirements engineering process.

1. Feasibility study: An estimate is made of whether the identified can be achieved using the current software and hardware technologies, under the current budget, etc. The feasibility study should be cheap and quick; it should inform the decision of whether or not to go ahead with the project.

2. Requirements elicitation and analysis: This is the process of deriving the system requirements through observation of existing systems, discussions with stakeholders, etc. This may involve the development of one or more system models and prototypes that can help us understanding the system to be specified.

3. Requirements specification: It’s the activity of writing down the information gathered during the elicitation and analysis activity into a document that defines a set of requirements. Two types of requirements may be included in this document; user and system requirements.

4. Requirements validation: It’s the process of checking the requirements for realism, consistency and completeness. During this process, our goal is to discover errors in the requirements document. When errors are found, it must be modified to correct these problems.