"Requirements management is being recognized as one of the most important albeit difficult phases in software engineering. The literature repeatedly cites the role of well-defined requirements and requirements management process in problem analysis and project management as benefiting software development throughout the life cycle: during design, coding, testing, maintenance and documentation of software.
This paper reports on the findings of an investigation into industrial practice of requirements management process improvement and its positive effects on downstream software development. The evidence reveals a strong relationship between a well-defined requirements process and increased developer productivity,
improved project planning through better estimations and enhanced ability for stakeholders to negotiate project scope. These results are important since there is little empirical evidence of the actual benefits of sound requirements practice, in spite of the plethora of claims in the literature. An account of these effects not only
adds to our understanding of good requirements practice but also provides strong motivation for software organizations to develop programs for improvement of their requirements processes.
Requirements Engineering as a Success Factor in Software Projects - By Hubert F. Hoffman, General Motors, and Franz Lehner, University of Regensburg, IEEE Software, July/August 2001
Getting requirements right might be the single most important and difficult part of a software project. This study was conducted to identify the RE practices that clearly contribute to software project success. It investigated team knowledge, allocated resources, and deployed RE processes. Fifteen RE teams from 9 development organizations in the telecommunications and baking industries participated in the study. Targeted projects were recently released critical business applications. On average, the projects finished in 16.5 months with an expended effort of 120 person-months.
Security Quality Requirements Engineering (SQUARE): Case Study Phase III - This special report is the third in a series by the Software Engineering Institute focusing on the practical application of the Security Quality Requirements Engineering (SQUARE) process. In this report, a student team presents their results of working with three clients over the course of a semester. Each client was developing a large-scale software application and worked with the students to generate security requirements. The students' main contribution to the SQUARE process was to determine how existing software requirements-elicitation techniques could be applied to software security requirements (as opposed to end-user requirements).
Using Inspections to Teach Requirements Validation - An article from the January, 2008 edition of CrossTalk by:
Lulu He, Mississippi State University
Jeffrey Carver, Ph.D., Mississippi State University
Rayford B. Vaughn, Ph.D., Mississippi State University
Abstract:
Requirements validation is often not adequately covered by a traditional software engineering curriculum in universities. This article describes an experiment conducted in a graduate-level requirements engineering course to provide students a real world experience in requirements validation. The experiment made use of the N-fold inspection method, in which multiple teams of students inspect the same requirements document then meet together to discuss their findings. This procedure allows the students to not only practice their reviewing skills, but also to strengthen their communication and collaboration skills. At the conclusion of the exercise, the students were given the opportunity to provide qualitative and quantitative feedback. The results of this study suggest that the techniques employed by this class and the resulting defect detection could be useful in general during the requirements validation process.
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