Chapter 4 – Requirements Engineering

Some of the slides are taken from: Prof. Gregor V. Bochmann’s Software Requirements
Analysis Course https://www.site.uottawa.ca/~bochmann/SEG3101/

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Topics covered

 Introduction to requirements analysis

 Functional and non-functional requirements
 Requirements engineering processes
 IEEE 830 – 1998 SRS

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Requirements engineering

 The process of establishing the services that a customer

requires from a system and the constraints under which
it operates and is developed.
 The system requirements are the descriptions of the
system services and constraints that are generated
during the requirements engineering process.

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What is a requirement?

 It may range from a high-level abstract statement of a

service or of a system constraint to a detailed
mathematical functional specification.
 Requirements may serve a dual function
 May be the basis for a bid for a contract.
 May be the basis for the contract itself.

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 Types of requirement

 User requirements
 Statements in natural language plus diagrams of the services the
system provides and its operational constraints.
 Written for customers.
 System requirements
 A structured document setting out detailed descriptions of the
system’s functions, services and operational constraints.
 Defines what should be implemented so may be part of a
contract between client and contractor.

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Mentcare

 Mentcare is a medical information system that maintains

information about patients suffering from mental health
problems and the treatments that they have received.
 It makes use of a centralized database of patient
information but has also been designed to run on a PC.
 It may be accessed and used from sites that do not have
secure network connectivity.
 When the local systems have secure network access,
they use patient information in the database but they can
download and use local copies of patient records when
they are disconnected.
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Mentcare goals

 To generate management information that allows health

service managers to assess performance against local
and government targets.
 To provide medical staff with timely information to
support the treatment of patients.

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The organization of the Mentcare system

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User and system requirements

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Readers of different types of requirements
specification

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User requirements vs. System requirements

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System stakeholders

 Any person or organization who is affected by the

system in some way and so who has a legitimate interest
 Stakeholder types
 End users
 System managers
 System owners
 External stakeholders

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Stakeholders in the Mentcare system

 Patients whose information is recorded in the system.

 Doctors who are responsible for assessing and treating
patients.
 Nurses who coordinate the consultations with doctors
and administer some treatments.
 Medical receptionists who manage patients’
appointments.
 IT staff who are responsible for installing and maintaining
the system.

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Stakeholders in the Mentcare system

 A medical ethics manager

 Ensure that the system meets current ethical guidelines for
patient care.
 Health care managers
 Obtain management information from the system.
 Medical records staff
 Responsible for ensuring that system information can be
maintained and preserved, and that record keeping procedures
have been properly implemented.

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 Functional and non-functional requirements

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Functional and non-functional requirements

 Functional requirements
 Statements of services the system should provide, how the system should
react to particular inputs and how the system should behave in particular
situations.
 May state what the system should not do.
 Non-functional requirements
 Constraints on the services or functions offered by the system such as
timing constraints, constraints on the development process, standards, etc.
 Often apply to the system as a whole rather than individual features or
services.
 Domain requirements
 Domain reflects the environment in which the system operates so.
 Constraints on the system from the domain of operation.

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Functional requirements

 Describe functionality or system services.

 Depend on the type of software, expected users and the
type of system where the software is used.
 Functional user requirements may be high-level
statements of what the system should do.
 Functional system requirements should describe the
system services in detail.

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Mentcare system: examples of functional
requirements

 A user shall be able to search the appointments lists for

all clinics.
 The system shall generate each day, for each clinic, a
list of patients who are expected to attend appointments
that day.
 Each staff member using the system shall be uniquely
identified by his or her 8-digit employee number.

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Non-functional requirements

 These define system properties and constraints e.g.

reliability, response time and storage requirements.
Constraints are I/O device capability, system
representations, etc.
 Process requirements may also be specified mandating
a particular IDE, programming language or development
method.
 Non-functional requirements may be more critical than
functional requirements. If these are not met, the system
may be useless.

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Types of nonfunctional requirement

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Non-functional classifications

 Product requirements
 Requirements which specify that the delivered product must
behave in a particular way e.g. execution speed, reliability, etc.
 Organisational requirements
 Requirements which are a consequence of organisational
policies and procedures e.g. process standards used,
implementation requirements, etc.
 External requirements
 Requirements which arise from factors which are external to the
system and its development process e.g. interoperability
requirements, legislative requirements, etc.

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Examples of nonfunctional requirements in the
Mentcare system

Product requirement
The Mentcare system shall be available to all clinics during normal
working hours (Mon–Fri, 0830–17.30). Downtime within normal
working hours shall not exceed five seconds in any one day.

Organizational requirement
Users of the Mentcare system shall authenticate themselves using
their health authority identity card.

External requirement
The system shall implement patient privacy provisions as set out in
HStan-03-2006-priv.

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Usability requirements

 The system should be easy to use by medical staff and

should be organized in such a way that user errors are
minimized. (Goal)
 Medical staff shall be able to use all the system functions
after four hours of training. After this training, the
average number of errors made by experienced users
shall not exceed two per hour of system use. (Testable
non-functional requirement)

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Metrics for specifying nonfunctional
requirements

Property Measure
Speed Processed transactions/second
User/event response time
Screen refresh time
Size Mbytes
Number of ROM chips
Ease of use Training time
Number of help frames
Reliability Mean time to failure
Probability of unavailability
Rate of failure occurrence
Availability
Robustness Time to restart after failure
Percentage of events causing failure
Probability of data corruption on failure
Portability Percentage of target dependent statements
Number of target systems
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 Requirements engineering processes

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Requirements engineering processes

 The processes used for RE vary widely depending on

the application domain, the people involved and the
organisation developing the requirements.
 However, there are a number of generic activities
common to all processes
 Requirements elicitation;
 Requirements analysis;
 Requirements validation;
 Requirements management.
 In practice, RE is an iterative activity in which these
processes are interleaved.

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A spiral view of the requirements engineering
process

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 Requirements elicitation

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Requirements elicitation and analysis

 Sometimes called requirements elicitation or

requirements discovery.
 Involves technical staff working with customers to find
out about the application domain, the services that the
system should provide and the system’s operational
constraints.
 May involve end-users, managers, engineers involved in
maintenance, domain experts, trade unions, etc. These
are called stakeholders.

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Requirements discovery

 The process of gathering information about the required

and existing systems and distilling the user and system
requirements from this information.
 Interaction is with system stakeholders from managers to
external regulators.
 Systems normally have a range of stakeholders.

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Interviewing

 Formal or informal interviews with stakeholders are part

of most RE processes.
 Types of interview
 Closed interviews based on pre-determined list of questions
 Open interviews where various issues are explored with
stakeholders.
 Effective interviewing
 Be open-minded, avoid pre-conceived ideas about the
requirements and are willing to listen to stakeholders.
 Prompt the interviewee to get discussions going using a
springboard question, a requirements proposal, or by working
together on a prototype system.
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Interviews in practice

 Normally a mix of closed and open-ended interviewing.

 Interviews are good for getting an overall understanding
of what stakeholders do and how they might interact with
the system.
 Interviewers need to be open-minded without pre-
conceived ideas of what the system should do
 You need to prompt the user to talk about the system by
suggesting requirements rather than simply asking them
what they want.

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Problems with interviews

 Application specialists may use language to describe

their work that isn’t easy for the requirements engineer to
understand.
 Interviews are not good for understanding domain
requirements
 Requirements engineers cannot understand specific domain
terminology;
 Some domain knowledge is so familiar that people find it hard to
articulate or think that it isn’t worth articulating.

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Stories and scenarios

 Scenarios and user stories are real-life examples of how

a system can be used.
 Stories and scenarios are a description of how a system
may be used for a particular task.
 Because they are based on a practical situation,
stakeholders can relate to them and can comment on
their situation with respect to the story.

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Scenarios

 A structured form of user story

 Scenarios should include
 A description of the starting situation;
 A description of the normal flow of events;
 A description of what can go wrong;
 Information about other concurrent activities;
 A description of the state when the scenario finishes.

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Example Scenario

 Scenario: ATM banking for the week.

 Sally Jones places her bank card into the ATM.
 Sally successfully logs into the ATM using her personal
identification number.
 Sally deposits her weekly paycheck of $350 into her savings
account.
 Sally pays her phone bill of $75, her electric bill of $145, her
cable bill of $55, and her water bill of $85 from her savings
account.
 Sally attempts to withdraw $100 from her savings account for the
weekend but discovers that she has insufficient funds.
 Sally withdraws $40 and gets her card back.

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 Requirements specification

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Requirements specification

 The process of writing down the user and system

requirements in a requirements document.
 User requirements have to be understandable by end-
users and customers who do not have a technical
background.
 System requirements are more detailed requirements
and may include more technical information.
 The requirements may be part of a contract for the
system development
 It is therefore important that these are as complete as possible.

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Ways of writing a system requirements
specification

Notation Description
Natural language The requirements are written using numbered sentences in natural language.
Each sentence should express one requirement.

Structured natural The requirements are written in natural language on a standard form or
language template. Each field provides information about an aspect of the
requirement. (e.g. use case specification)
Graphical notations Graphical models, supplemented by text annotations, are used to define the
functional requirements for the system; UML use case and sequence
diagrams are commonly used.
Mathematical These notations are based on mathematical concepts such as finite-state
specifications machines or sets. Although these unambiguous specifications can reduce
the ambiguity in a requirements document, most customers don’t understand
a formal specification. They cannot check that it represents what they want
and are reluctant to accept it as a system contract.

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A structured specification of a requirement for
an insulin pump

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A structured specification of a requirement for
an insulin pump

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Use cases

 Use-cases are a kind of scenario that are included in the

UML.
 Use cases identify the actors in an interaction and which
describe the interaction itself.
 A set of use cases should describe all possible
interactions with the system.
 High-level graphical model supplemented by more
detailed tabular description.
 UML sequence diagrams may be used to add detail to
use-cases by showing the sequence of event processing
in the system.
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Use cases for the Mentcare system

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The software requirements document

 The software requirements document is the official

statement of what is required of the system developers.
 Should include both a definition of user requirements
and a specification of the system requirements.
 It is NOT a design document. As far as possible, it
should set of WHAT the system should do rather than
HOW it should do it.

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Users of a requirements document

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 Requirements validation

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Requirements validation

 Concerned with demonstrating that the requirements

define the system that the customer really wants.
 Requirements error costs are high so validation is very
important
 Fixing a requirements error after delivery may cost up to 100
times the cost of fixing an implementation error.

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Requirements validation techniques

 Requirements reviews
 Systematic manual analysis of the requirements.
 Prototyping
 Using an executable model of the system to check requirements.
 Test-case generation
 Developing tests for requirements to check testability.

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 Requirements change

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Requirements evolution

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Requirements change management

 Deciding if a requirements change should be accepted

 Problem analysis and change specification
• During this stage, the problem or the change proposal is analyzed
to check that it is valid. This analysis is fed back to the change
requestor who may respond with a more specific requirements
change proposal, or decide to withdraw the request.
 Change analysis and costing
• The effect of the proposed change is assessed using traceability
information and general knowledge of the system requirements.
Once this analysis is completed, a decision is made whether or not
to proceed with the requirements change.
 Change implementation
• The requirements document and, where necessary, the system
design and implementation, are modified. Ideally, the document
should be organized so that changes can be easily implemented.
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Requirements change management

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Milestone 1

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