Requirements Practice

by Michael J. Ryan

Much has been written about requirements engineering, by both academics and practitioners. Yet, in all of these descriptions, the focus is on what to do, rather than how to do it. In particular, most of what is written focuses either on the very high-level consideration of requirements frameworks and elicitation techniques, or on the very low-level activities such as the syntax of good requirement statements. It is important to understand these issues, but it is also important to address what are arguably the most important activities—those that are undertaken to articulate the purpose of the system; gather the relevant information; analyze, negotiate, and synthesize the needs and requirements; and then present them in such a manner that describes the system’s mission in order to meet the business needs. While addressing upper-level frameworks and lower-level requirements-writing skills, this text focuses principally on how to ‘do’ requirements engineering such that the resulting artefacts not only have the right shape, but also have the right content. The methodology presented provides a framework for requirements-engineering activities associated with the development of the logical (functional) architecture (the conduct of logical design in the Conceptual Design phase of the system life cycle), and is called for convenience the Conceptual Design Methodology (CDM).

246 pages, Paperback

Published January 1, 2017