Requirements Engineering

Requirements Engineering

Course Content

The role of the analyst

• The role and competencies of an analyst
• Developing analyst competencies

The requirements engineering process

• The importance of requirements engineering
• A framework for requirements engineering
• Requirements engineering in the systems development lifecycle
• Characteristics of requirements engineering

Actors and viewpoints

• Stakeholders in systems development projects
• Roles and responsibilities in the requirements engineering process

Project initiation

• The importance of the project initiation stage
• The project initiation document

Facilitated workshops

• The use of workshops to elicit, analyse and negotiate requirements
• Structure of a facilitated workshop
• Workshop roles
• Facilitation skills
• Stimulating creative thinking

Other requirements elicitation techniques

• Observation and ethnographic studies
• Activity sampling
• Document and data source analysis
• Questionnaires
• Choosing the appropriate technique/s

Fact-finding Interviewing

• Structure of a fact-finding interview
• Questioning techniques
• Documenting interviews

Documenting and modelling requirements

• Functional and non-functional requirements
• Technical and general requirements
• The requirements catalogue
• Interpreting class diagrams
• Scoping systems and documenting requirements with use cases

Analysing requirements

• Examining the requirements catalogue
• Prioritising requirements (MoSCoW)
• Checking for ambiguity and lack of clarity
• Testability of requirements

Scenarios and prototyping

• The use of scenarios to explore requirements
• Use case descriptions as a method of documenting scenarios
• The use of prototyping to explore requirements
• Types of prototyping (throwaway, evolutionary etc.)
• The dangers and difficulties of prototyping; managing prototyping exercises

Requirements management

• Change and version control of requirements
• Requirements traceability
• The use of CASE tools in requirements engineering

Validating requirements

• Validation techniques

• Quality control in requirements engineering