Software requirements [1] for a system are the description of what the system should do, the service or services that it provides and the constraints on its operation. The IEEE Standard Glossary of Software Engineering Terminology defines a requirement as: [2]
The activities related to working with software requirements can broadly be broken down into elicitation, analysis, specification, and management. [3]
Note that the wording Software requirements is additionally used in software release notes to explain, which depending on software packages are required for a certain software to be built/installed/used. [1]
Elicitation is the gathering and discovery of requirements from stakeholders and other sources. A variety of techniques can be used such as joint application design (JAD) sessions, interviews, document analysis, focus groups, etc. Elicitation is the first step of requirements development.
Analysis is the logical breakdown that proceeds from elicitation. Analysis involves reaching a richer and more precise understanding of each requirement and representing sets of requirements in multiple, complementary ways.
Requirements Triage or prioritization of requirements is another activity which often follows analysis. [4] This relates to Agile software development in the planning phase, e.g. by Planning poker, however it might not be the same depending on the context and nature of the project and requirements or product/service that is being built.
Specification involves representing and storing the collected requirements knowledge in a persistent and well-organized fashion that facilitates effective communication and change management. Use cases, user stories, functional requirements, and visual analysis models are popular choices for requirements specification.
Validation involves techniques to confirm that the correct set of requirements has been specified to build a solution that satisfies the project's business objectives.
Requirements change during projects and there are often many of them. Management of this change becomes paramount to ensuring that the correct software is built for the stakeholders.
Taking into account that these activities may involve some artifacts such as observation reports (user observation), questionnaires (interviews, surveys and polls), use cases, user stories; activities such as requirement workshops (charrettes), brainstorming, mind mapping, role-playing; and even, prototyping; [5] software products providing some or all of these capabilities can be used to help achieve these tasks.
There is at least one author who advocates, explicitly, for mind mapping tools such as FreeMind; and, alternatively, for the use of specification by example tools such as Concordion. [6] Additionally, the ideas and statements resulting from these activities may be gathered and organized with wikis and other collaboration tools such as Trello. The features actually implemented and standards compliance vary from product to product.
A Software requirements specification (SRS) document might be created using general-purpose software like a word processor or one of several specialized tools. Some of these tools can import, edit, export and publish SRS documents. It may help to make SRS documents while following a standardised structure and methodology, such as ISO/IEC/IEEE 29148:2018. Likewise, software may or not use some standard to import or export requirements (such as ReqIF) or not allow these exchanges at all.
Tools of this kind verify if there are any errors in a requirements document according to some expected structure or standard.
Tools of this kind compare two requirement sets according to some expected document structure and standard.
Tools of this kind allow the merging and update of requirement documents.
Tools of this kind allow tracing requirements to other artifacts such as models and source code (forward traceability) or, to previous ones such as business rules and constraints (backwards traceability).
Model-based systems engineering (MBSE) is the formalised application of modelling to support system requirements, design, analysis, verification and validation activities beginning in the conceptual design phase and continuing throughout development and later lifecycle phases. It is also possible to take a model-based approach for some stages of the requirements engineering and, a more traditional one, for others. Very many combinations might be possible.
The level of formality and complexity depends on the underlying methodology involved (for instance, i* is much more formal than SysML and, even more formal than UML)
Tools in this category may provide some mix of the capabilities mentioned previously and others such as requirement configuration management and collaboration. The features actually implemented and standards compliance vary from product to product.
There are even more capable or general tools that support other stages and activities. They are classified as ALM tools.
In engineering and its various subdisciplines, acceptance testing is a test conducted to determine if the requirements of a specification or contract are met. It may involve chemical tests, physical tests, or performance tests.
Software testing is the act of checking whether software satisfies expectations.
Software configuration management (SCM), a.k.a. software change and configuration management (SCCM), is the software engineering practice of tracking and controlling changes to a software system; part of the larger cross-disciplinary field of configuration management (CM). SCM includes version control and the establishment of baselines.
In systems engineering and software engineering, requirements analysis focuses on the tasks that determine the needs or conditions to meet the new or altered product or project, taking account of the possibly conflicting requirements of the various stakeholders, analyzing, documenting, validating, and managing software or system requirements.
In engineering, a requirement is a condition that must be satisfied for the output of a work effort to be acceptable. It is an explicit, objective, clear and often quantitative description of a condition to be satisfied by a material, design, product, or service.
In systems engineering, information systems and software engineering, the systems development life cycle (SDLC), also referred to as the application development life cycle, is a process for planning, creating, testing, and deploying an information system. The SDLC concept applies to a range of hardware and software configurations, as a system can be composed of hardware only, software only, or a combination of both. There are usually six stages in this cycle: requirement analysis, design, development and testing, implementation, documentation, and evaluation.
In software project management, software testing, and software engineering, verification and validation is the process of checking that a software engineer system meets specifications and requirements so that it fulfills its intended purpose. It may also be referred to as software quality control. It is normally the responsibility of software testers as part of the software development lifecycle. In simple terms, software verification is: "Assuming we should build X, does our software achieve its goals without any bugs or gaps?" On the other hand, software validation is: "Was X what we should have built? Does X meet the high-level requirements?"
Requirements engineering (RE) is the process of defining, documenting, and maintaining requirements in the engineering design process. It is a common role in systems engineering and software engineering.
A software requirements specification (SRS) is a description of a software system to be developed. It is modeled after the business requirements specification (CONOPS). The software requirements specification lays out functional and non-functional requirements, and it may include a set of use cases that describe user interactions that the software must provide to the user for perfect interaction.
Software prototyping is the activity of creating prototypes of software applications, i.e., incomplete versions of the software program being developed. It is an activity that can occur in software development and is comparable to prototyping as known from other fields, such as mechanical engineering or manufacturing.
Computer-aided production engineering (CAPE) is a relatively new and significant branch of engineering. Global manufacturing has changed the environment in which goods are produced. Meanwhile, the rapid development of electronics and communication technologies has required design and manufacturing to keep pace.
Requirements management is the process of documenting, analyzing, tracing, prioritizing and agreeing on requirements and then controlling change and communicating to relevant stakeholders. It is a continuous process throughout a project. A requirement is a capability to which a project outcome should conform.
A software factory is a structured collection of related software assets that aids in producing computer software applications or software components according to specific, externally defined end-user requirements through an assembly process. A software factory applies manufacturing techniques and principles to software development to mimic the benefits of traditional manufacturing. Software factories are generally involved with outsourced software creation.
Software assurance (SwA) is a critical process in software development that ensures the reliability, safety, and security of software products. It involves a variety of activities, including requirements analysis, design reviews, code inspections, testing, and formal verification. One crucial component of software assurance is secure coding practices, which follow industry-accepted standards and best practices, such as those outlined by the Software Engineering Institute (SEI) in their CERT Secure Coding Standards (SCS).
Software project management is the process of planning and leading software projects. It is a sub-discipline of project management in which software projects are planned, implemented, monitored and controlled.
The systems modeling language (SysML) is a general-purpose modeling language for systems engineering applications. It supports the specification, analysis, design, verification and validation of a broad range of systems and systems-of-systems.
Requirements traceability is a sub-discipline of requirements management within software development and systems engineering. Traceability as a general term is defined by the IEEE Systems and Software Engineering Vocabulary as (1) the degree to which a relationship can be established between two or more products of the development process, especially products having a predecessor-successor or primary-subordinate relationship to one another; (2) the identification and documentation of derivation paths (upward) and allocation or flowdown paths (downward) of work products in the work product hierarchy; (3) the degree to which each element in a software development product establishes its reason for existing; and (4) discernible association among two or more logical entities, such as requirements, system elements, verifications, or tasks.
Verification and validation are independent procedures that are used together for checking that a product, service, or system meets requirements and specifications and that it fulfills its intended purpose. These are critical components of a quality management system such as ISO 9000. The words "verification" and "validation" are sometimes preceded with "independent", indicating that the verification and validation is to be performed by a disinterested third party. "Independent verification and validation" can be abbreviated as "IV&V".
In requirements engineering, requirements elicitation is the practice of researching and discovering the requirements of a system from users, customers, and other stakeholders. The practice is also sometimes referred to as "requirement gathering".
In software engineering, a software development process or software development life cycle (SDLC) is a process of planning and managing software development. It typically involves dividing software development work into smaller, parallel, or sequential steps or sub-processes to improve design and/or product management. The methodology may include the pre-definition of specific deliverables and artifacts that are created and completed by a project team to develop or maintain an application.
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