REQUIREMENTS ENGINEERING PROCESSES:
Requirement engineering processes may include four high-level activities. These focus on assessing if the system is useful to the business (feasibility study), discovering requirements (elicitation and analysis), converting these requirements into some standard form (specification), and checking that the requirements actually define the system that the customer wants (validation).
Some people consider requirements engineering to be the process of applying a structured analysis method, such as object-oriented analysis. This involves analyzing the system and developing a set of graphical system models, such as use case models, which then serve as a system specification. The set of models describes the behavior of the system and is annotated with additional information describing, for example, the system’s required performance or reliability.
Although structured methods have a role to play in the requirements engineering process, there is much more to requirements engineering than is covered by these methods. Requirements elicitation, in particular, is a human-centered activity and people dislike the constraints imposed on it by rigid system models.
In virtually all systems, requirements change. The people involved develop a better understanding of what they want the software to do; the organization buying the system changes; modifications are made to the system’s hardware, software, and organizational environment. The process of managing these changing requirements is called requirements management.
