Requirements engineering: A roadmap

Question 1

What is the primare measury of succes of a software system?

Answer 1

How well it meets its intended purpose.

Question 2

What is requirements engineering?

Answer 2

The process of discovering the purpose of a software system by identifying stakeholders, documenting their needs, and making them amendable to analysis, communication, and implementation.

Question 3

What are some inherent difficulties in the requirements engineering process?

Answer 3

Numerous and distributed stakeholders with varying and conflicting goals, implicit or difficult to articulate goals, and satisfaction constraints.

Question 4

What are some characteristings of the core RE activities?

Answer 4

They are interleaved, iterative, and may span the entire software and systems development life cycle.

Question 5

What are some examples of foundations for effective RE that provide context and background needed to beging the RE process?

Answer 5

Software and systems engineering.

Question 6

What is RE concerned with (what it want’s to identify)?

Answer 6

The real-world goals for, functions of, and constraints on software systems, and their relationship to precise specifications of software behavior, and their evoulition over time and across software families.

Question 7

What role does RE play as a part of an engineering process (what is it concerned with/its goal)?

Answer 7

Being concerned with anchoring development activites to a real-worl problem, so that the approprateness and cost-effectiveness of the solution can be analyzed.

Question 8

What does RE aim to deliver?

Answer 8

It aims to deliver some systems behavior to stakeholdes.

Question 9

What are some tasks that RE does in the SE process?

Answer 9

Systems analysis, characterizing systems, identifying their boundaries, and managing their development life cycle.

Question 10

What are some things RE needs to be sensitive to regarding people?

Answer 10

How they perceive and understand the world around them, how they interact, and how the sociology of the workplace affects their actions.

Question 11

What does context include as a part of preparation?

Answer 11

Assessing the type of product and the variety of context is which RE is performed.

Question 12

What does groundwork include as a part of preparation?

Answer 12

The identification of a suitable process for RE and the selection of methods and techniques for the various RE activites.

Question 13

What activity most often regarded as the first step in the RE process?

Answer 13

Eliciting requirements.

Question 14

What is the goal of elicitation?

Answer 14

To find out what problem needs to be solved and identify system boudaries.

Question 15

What relation does elicitation techniques and modeling schemes have?

Answer 15

Elicitation techniques are driven by the choice of modeling scheme, an vice versa. Many modeling schemes imply the use of particular kinds of elicitation techniques.

Question 16

What is RE about, else than discovering discovering and specifying requirements?

Answer 16

Effective communications of these requirements among different stakeholdes.

Question 17

What is an important role of requirements documentation, in terms of communicating requirements?

Answer 17

To ensure that requirements can be read, analyzed, (re-)written, and validated.

Question 18

Why can’t standards or templates provide a general structuring mechanism for requirements?

Answer 18

The structure has to be developed for the particular context or problem in hand.

Question 19

What can requirements traceability help to determine?

Answer 19

How easy it is to read, navigate, query, and change requirements documentation.

Question 20

In terms of communicating requirements, what can requirements traceability be a means of?

Answer 20

Achieving integrity and completeness that documentation and help managing change.

Question 21

What does the validation process do?

Answer 21

It establishes that the requirements and models elicited provide an accurate account of stakeholder requirements.

Question 22

What does techniques such as inspection and formal analysis tend to concentrate on?

Answer 22

The coherence of the requirements desciptions.

Question 23

What does techniques such as prototyping, specification animation, and use of scenarios tend to concentrate on?

Answer 23

Testing correspondence with the real-world problem.

Question 24

What else is managing changing requirements a process of, else than managing documentation?

Answer 24

A process of recognizing change through continued requirements elicitation, re-evaluation of risk, and evaluation of systems in their operational environment.

Question 25

What loss can focusing change on program code lead to?

Answer 25

Loss of structure and maintainability.

Question 26

What is one of the key research issues in SE, regarding architectures?

Answer 26

The process of identifying requirements to develop architectures that are stable in the presence of change and flexible enough to be customized and adapted to changing requirements.

Question 27

What are the three new ideas that emerged during the 1990s when RE emerged as a field of study in its own right?

Answer 27

1. Modelling and analysis cannot be performed adequately in isolation from the organizational and social context.
2. RE should focus on modelling indicative and optative properties of the environment insted of specifying the functionality of a new system.
3. The attemt to build consistent and complete requirements models is futile, and RE has to take seriously the need to analyze and resolve conflicting requirements.

Question 28

In the future, what are some major challenges for RE?

Answer 28

The development of new techniques for formally modeling and analyzing properties of the environment as well as bridging the gap between requirements elicitation approaches bansed on contextual inquiry and more formal specification and analysis techniques.