Software Requirements: What and Why

• Requirements: fantasies and real world 
• What is a requirement?
• Three purposes of requirements
• Product and project requirements
• Levels and types of requirements
• Characteristics of good individual requirements
• Characteristics of good sets of requirements
• The Vision Statement as the top-level requirement
• Requirements as a risk management activity
• Knowing when you're done

The Requirements Process

• Comprehensive strategies for defining requirements
• Iterative elicitation, analysis, specification, and validation
• Breadth-first approaches
• Depth-first approaches
• Spiral approaches
• Tools: chartering workshop, collaborative development, risk management, parallel development

Requirements Elicitation

• Who has requirements?
• Eliciting requirements from people
• Eliciting requirements from other systems
• Eliciting requirements from the environment
• Finding the decision maker
• Incorporating business rules
• Finding the abnormal and exception cases
• Dealing with ambiguity
• Tools: interviews, context-free questioning, brainstorming, JAD workshops, prototyping, task analysis, use cases, competitive benchmarking, document archeology, project charter, vision statement

Who Defines Requirements

• The requirements engineer
• Requirements engineering roles
• Skills needed to develop requirements effectively
• How the requirements engineer relates to the rest of the project
• Checklist for requirements leads

• Classification and prioritization schemes
• Requirements negotiation
• Tools: prototypes, use cases, essential systems modeling, data dictionary

• Characteristics of a good requirement specification
• Models as specification
• Guidelines for writing requirements
• Picking the right model for the task at hand
• Quantifying qualitative attributes
• Writing effective use cases
• Organizing the requirements
• Achieving right-weight documentation
• Putting it all together: The Software Requirements Specification
• Tools: usability studies, prototyping, use cases, fit criteria, User Guide as specification, Planguage, context diagrams, information/class diagrams, data flow diagrams, decision tables, state transition diagrams, sequence diagrams, decision tables, data dictionary, project glossary, specification templates

Requirements Validation

• What is the difference between validation and verification?
• Validation techniques
• Formal and informal inspections
• Checklists
• Creating test cases
• Tools: ambiguity metric, prototyping, requirements reviews and checklists, usability studies

Requirements Management

• Why requirements change
• Role of a requirements baseline
• Attributes needed to support well-managed requirements
• Controlling change using corrective activity management
• Status tracking
• Tools: change control policy and change control board, traceability tools, version control

Special Considerations

• Requirements in outsourced projects
• Requirements in maintenance projects
• Requirements in component-based systems