Requirements for cross-cutting qualities
Assuring cross-cutting quality is a challenge that has become increasingly important as systems grow more complex. This also impacts how Requirements Engineering (RE) approaches …
Showing 53 articles
Strengthening the Requirements Engineering Process
The quality of a requirement is significantly dependent on its clarity and completeness. In many agile projects, requirements typically capture the primary intent of the software. …
Using AI to discover more innovative requirements from documents
This article demonstrates how to increase the novelty of innovation opportunities generated by AI without losing their usefulness. Drawing on established models of creativity, the …
RMMi 1.0: A New Maturity Model for Requirements Engineering
After several years of research, iterations, and community feedback, the Requirements Maturity Model Integration (RMMi) has reached its first official release: version 1.0. Born …
How Epics Systematically Prevent the Implementation of Core Requirements
Discover the pitfalls of requirement prioritization in scaled agile frameworks. This article shows how epics and their use in scaled frameworks can systematically delay the …
How to go about it – a GDPR action plan | Part 2
Compliance with the European 'General Data Protection Regulation' (GDPR) requires a careful and structured approach by a team with many skills. It touches on a multitude of …
Why and when must requirement engineers pay attention to the GDPR? | Part 1
Data, and in particular personal data, is the new gold, and with it comes the need for appropriate protection. The European ‘General Data Protection Regulation’ [1] is the 'gold …
Integrating User-Centric Design in Business Analysis
Discover how user-centric design (UCD) can transform business analysis to create more intuitive, efficient, and user-friendly solutions. This article delves into the practical …
Requirements Elicitation in Modern Product Discovery
If you are working on products, you have realized product management handles requirements in a different way. When a business analyst or a product owner is eliciting requirements, …
Splitting Requirements at Scale
Analysis means breaking down large problems into smaller, more manageable ones. We, as BAs, understand intuitively that this is what we do and that how well we do this will likely …
Classical requirements and test analysis a discontinued model?
In times of increasing "agilization", the question arises as to whether classic requirements engineering and test analysis are still relevant at all. Since the IT of banks and …
Integrating Business Events into your Agile Framework
Business Event partitioning has been around for a long time and has helped Business Analysts to improve their requirements discovery and to develop better skills for identifying …
Discovering System Requirements through SysML
For Business Analysts/Requirement Engineers/System Analysts, the greatest innovation brought by the Systems Modeling Language (SysML) is the introduction of 1) the requirement as …
Inputs to requirements engineering in agile projects
Practices from the Agile software development (ASD) spectrum are adopted by enterprises worldwide for project and product development. Either adopting practices from management …
The Potential of User Tests for Requirements Engineering
The article covers a topic of software tests as a requirement source, as techniques to investigate requirements and confirm compliance of the final product with requirements. In …
How Will It Work?
In a previous article Business Analysis Viewpoints [1] we discussed a number of ways of looking at systems. The intention of these viewpoints is to make it easier to see and …
Learning from history: The case of Software Requirements Engineering
This article describes initial conclusions of our research into how and why the requirements engineer’s role has changed over the years, with the longer-term goal of developing …
ReqInspector
During the process of requirements engineering, incompletely specified requirements require iterative follow-up discussions with stakeholders to complete and disambiguate …
Data Science – the expanding frontier for Business Analysts
Prelude As Business Analysts our profession is constantly evolving over time. As our roles mature, our experience, expertise, and skills gradually move us from informants to …
Is there something missing?
Introduction With the exponential number of international projects and the rising complexity of the products being developed, sharing a common language among project members has …
When the rubber hits the road
Introduction There are a number of quality criteria for requirements. IREB Syllabus [1] groups them into three aspects: content, documentation and agreement. The quality aspect …
Challenges in the elicitation and determination of precise requirements from animal stakeholders
Dogs do speak, but only to those who know how to listen. Orhan Pamuk
Discover Quality Requirements with the Mini-QAW
Good quality requirements help software engineers make the right architectural design decisions. Unfortunately, collecting requirements is not always easy. The Quality Attribute …
REQM guidance matrix
Requirements Management (REQM) is described as a key area for several disciplines: Enterprise Architecture, Business Analysis, Software Engineering and Process Maturity. To help …
Functional Requirements and their levels of granularity
The level of granularity is the greater or lesser extent in the description of expected software behaviour in a functional specification. It defines how detailed or how …
Tracing Change Requests
One of the biggest challenges in software maintenance is the need to trace incoming change requests to the code affected by those requests. This need is especially acute in large …
KCycle: Knowledge-Based & Agile Software Quality Assurance
Agile paradigms and DevOps approaches have changed software engineering processes by focusing on iterativity, communication and collaboration between different project roles. …
Modeling Requirements with Constraints
Modeling requirements is not really new, but there are many ways to do it. We discovered constraints as a powerful concept that allowed us to create concise models that are lean, …
The Context-Canvas
Digitalization is becoming increasingly prevalent in manufacturing industries. Co-working mechanical engineers and computer scientists are aware of the challenges posed by a …
How Requirements Engineering can benefit from crowds
Requirements are usually elicited, analyzed, and validated using techniques that are strongly based on the co-presence of the persons involved. These techniques can quickly become …
Leveraging Creativity Techniques in Requirements Elicitation
In recent years, Creativity-based Approaches for Requirements Elicitation (CAREs) have appeared as one promising trend to tackle the requirements elicitation problem. …
Modeling Requirements and Context as a means for Automated Requirements Validation
When designing an automation plant the control software for the entire plant is typically designed after the physical architecture of the automation plant and the technical plant …
The Genius Toddler Challenge
“How hard can it be?” is a question posed by virtually everybody at one point or another regarding a line of work they are currently not involved in. We all know how hard it is to …
An “agile” lifecycle for requirements
In a previous article [1], we claimed that at least in certain circumstances, for certain types of systems, the requirements management discipline is still necessary in an agile …
Cyber Security Requirements Engineering
Sophisticated functionality and ever-increasing perfection of embedded and distributed IT systems have been made possible through an increasing amount of interconnected …
IT Requirements when Buying, not Making
Procuring off-the-shelf or COTS software is often the only feasible route to access new facilities, due to the reduced time, cost, risk and organisational impact [1] [2]. For some …
A Finite State Machine Model for Requirements Engineering
Requirement models are used to clarify and improve requirements consistency, unambiguity, correctness and completeness. The finite state machine (FSM) model is very popular with …
Mobile RE
This year we’re definitely headed for the future. Do you remember the 1985 movie Back to the Future? Marty McFly lands in Hill Valley, California on October 21st 2015 at 4:29pm. …
Modeling Requirements with SysML
In this paper, we will show how the SysML modeling language can be useful to complement the requirements process, i.e. to better define and trace requirements. The Systems …
Catching the worm
In early project phases it is one of the main objectives to evaluate whether or not it is reasonable to conduct the project from an economic standpoint. Normally a business case …
Bridging communication gaps with a Feature Tree
We are in the machine industry. A company was willing to change the working mode of the software development department as part of a huge Research and Development (R&D) …
The Recover Approach
The alignment between requirements and tests and the need for explicit requirements specifications to better support knowledge management in software projects are key quality …
Advance
The emergent discipline of using formal modelling and analysis to support industrial scale requirements engineering has matured in recent years [Woodcock et al. 2009]. This …
Customized Agile RE Process
‘Classic upfront Requirements Engineering before the start of a project costs too much time and money!’ …nowadays, phrases like this reflect most customers’ view of heavy …
Readable requirements
At the Deutsche Telekom subsidiary T-Systems, Word templates have been created for entering requirements using the “Information Mapping®” method. The templates developed in this …
TORE
When engineering requirements, many requirements professionals are challenged not only by the question of how to elicit or specify requirements, but additionally by knowing which …
Automated Quality Assurance
There are many ways to check the content of the software requirements manually – inspections, reviews, walkthroughs, etc. However the attempt to automate the checking of …
Rigorous Verification
ADVANCE is a European-wide initiative between industry and academia to lead the future development of high-quality embedded systems in a more cost-effective way. The approach …
A key technique
This article is the second in a series of articles on requirements engineering published by Crescendo Technologies, following "This is not a requirement (of this system)" [1]. The …
Opportunities & Approaches
Motivation for Requirement Re-Use: When you compare the re-use of requirements with the re-use of designs you may get the impression that re-use of requirements rarely happens. …
Innovation Arena
Prioritization of requirements is an essential activity. Most important requirements shall be developed first, optimizing the return on investment. The weak point is how to decide …
RE for Testers
Testers use requirements as the basis of test cases, review them for testability, and often participate in general requirement reviews or inspections. Unfortunately, many testers …
Think Like a Scientist
All organizations strive to meet their envisioned goals and strategic objectives, creating greater business value for their stakeholders. While not all organizations are …