Defining and classifying requirements (new publication)
Software engineering has improved a lot in the past couple of decades, but there remains an area where the old doomsday style of starting a software engineering paper (software crisis, everything is rotten…) still fits: requirements engineering. Just see the chasm between textbook advice and the practice of most projects.
I have written on requirements in this blog, including very recently, and will continue in forthcoming installments. For today I want to point to a recent article [1], presented at the newly revived TOOLS conference in October. It attempts to bring some order and rigor to the basic definitions in the field.
From the abstract:
Requirements engineering is crucial to software development but lacks a precise definition of its fundamental concepts. Even the basic definitions in the literature and in industry standards are often vague and verbose.
To remedy this situation and provide a solid basis for discussions of requirements, this work provides precise definitions of the fundamental requirements concepts and two systematic classifications: a taxonomy of requirement elements (such as components, goals, constraints…) ; and a taxonomy of possible relations between these elements (such as “extends”, “excepts”, “belongs”…).
The discussion evaluates the taxonomies on published requirements documents; readers can test the concepts in two online quizzes.
The intended result of this work is to spur new advances in the study and practice of software requirements by clarifying the fundamental concepts.
This version is a first step; we are aware of its limitations and are already revising the definitions and taxonomy. The project is aimed at providing a solid foundation for a delicate area of software engineering and it will take some time to get it completely right. Still, I think the paper as it is already introduces important concepts. I will within the next two weeks write a more detailed blog article summarizing some of them.
References
[1] Bertrand Meyer, Jean-Michel Bruel, Sophie Ebersold, Florian Galinier, Alexandr Naumchev, The Anatomy of Requirements, in TOOLS 51, Software Technology: Methods and Tools
Innopolis, Russia, October 15–17, 2019, pages 10-40, available here (Springer site, paywall) and here (arXiv draft).
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