What is Requirements Engineering?
| What is Requirements Engineering? |
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The Production of Requirements, or simply Requirements, is one of the disciplines that constitute the Software Engineering. It consists, essentially, in to apprehend needs and to formalize them so that they can serve as input for the accomplishment of a software project. Requirements Engineering is the group of methods, techniques, and patterns whose objective is to uniformize and to turn more efficient the activity of producing requirements. The Requirements Engineering is composed by five disciplines: elicitation, formalization, specification, validation and management. 1. Elicitation: it is the process for which the requirements are obtained. It is usually taken to the practice through meetings between analysts of requirements and users. These meetings, in agreement with the situation in subject, can have different formats: interviews, workshops, brainstorms etc. Besides, several tools can be used for the facilitation of the process: questionnaires, prototypes, operational sceneries etc. 2. Formalization: to formalize means to give form to that doesn't possess, in other words, in the case of the Requirements Engineering, to that was elicited. The formalization process consists in the abstraction of that is indeed necessary in the users' point of view. Of what it had been obtained in the elicitation process, the redundancies and irrelevant aspects for the problem in subject are removed. Besides, it can be decomposed and to produce two or more requirements where there was only one. 3. Specification: to specify is to describe in full detail. The specification needs to contemplate with accuracy the formalized requirement. In such a way that when reading the specification, somebody that has not participated in the previous processes, can understand the requirement as if had. The language of the specification is extremely important. It can besides use graphic resources to facilitate the understanding. 4. Validation: the specification should be validated by the users. The users should notice that the group of requirements specified satisfies their needs indeed. For that, besides aspects strictly related to content, it should be considered the form with that the validation will happen. Just as in the case of the elicitation process, it should consider the concrete situation for the establishment of a more appropriate format. 5. Management: it seeks to guarantee that the requirements can be stored, updated, recovered and tracked in a simple and effective way. It is important to emphasize that this discipline should be accomplished to the parallel others and, besides, it should be goal of a planning that precedes the process of production of requirements. |
