lesson 5 on CST 9 AI - Requirements and Requirements Engineering

Requirements and Requirements Engineering

1. Requirements
and
Requirements
Engineering

2. Objectives
Discuss requirement
and requirements
engineering;
1
Explain the concepts of
user and system
requirements;
2
Determine and
understand the
differences between
the different types of
software requirements;
3
Understand why
requirements
engineering is
significant in software
development.
4

3. Introduction
•Requirements,by definition, are the descriptions on how the system will function in
terms of the services it provides as well as the constraints on its operation.
•As these requirements will be used to develop a software that meets the needs of the
users, it is very critical to understand what are the requirements needs to be reflected
for systems that functions for a certain purpose.
•The process of finding out, analyzing and establishing the services and constraints that
the user would like to see in a developed system is the focus of requirements
engineering.

4. Activity
Consider an airline reservation
system. It is a computerized
system that is used to conduct
transactions related to air travel
which allows customers to book
flights by making reservations.
Analyze how an airline
reservation system works and
answer the following questions
below.

5. Questions
1. Identify who are the stakeholders involved in an airline
reservation system and explain each of their
role/functions.
2. List down the possible features and functionalities of an
airline reservation system.
3. Based on the listed possible features and
functionalities, answer the following:
a. What do you think are the kind of information
needed to book for a flight?
b. In terms of seconds, how fast must be the
response time of the system to return the results for
availability of flights?
c. Preferably, which hardware, operating systems,
browsers and their versions do the software must run on?
d. How much time is it available to users against
downtimes?

6. There are two (2)
types of
requirements:
1. User Requirements
➢Defined as statements in natural
language plus diagrams of the services the
system provides and its operational
constraints. This requirement is written for
customers.
➢Usually the readers of user
requirements are client managers, system
end-users, client engineers, contractor
managers and system architectures. They are
not usually concerned with how the system
will be implemented.

7. There are two
(2) types of
requirements:
User Requirements
•Functional Requirements
•Non-functional
Requirements
System Requirements

8. Example:
•The Mental Health Care Patient Management
System (MHC-PMS) shall generate monthly
management reports showing the cost of
drugs prescribed by each clinic during that
month.

9. There are two (2) types of requirements:
•System Requirements
➢Defined as a more detailed descriptions of the software system’s functions,
services, and operational constraints. The system requirements document is a structured
document which should define exactly what must be implemented since these system
requirements may be part of the contract between the system buyer and the software
developer.
➢The readers of the system requirements are system end-users, client engineers,
system architects and software developers. Since they are involved in the implementation,
they have toknow the details on what the system will do. They are also more concerned on
how these requirements will support the business processes.

10. Example:
•1.1 On the last working day of each month, a summary of the drugs prescribed, their cost
and the prescribing clinics shall be generated.
•1.2 The system shall automatically generate the report for printing after 17.30 on the last
working day of the month.
•1.3 A report shall be created for each clinic and shall list the individual drug names, the
total number of prescriptions, the number of doses prescribed and the total cost of the
prescribed drugs.

11. Example:
•1.4 If drugs are available in different dose units (e.g.10mg, 20mg, etc.) separate reports
shall be created for each dose unit.
•1.5 Access to all cost reports shall be restricted to authorized users listed on a
management access control list.

12. Classification
•Software system requirements are often classified
as either
•functional or
•nonfunctional requirement:

13. Functional requirement
•These are requirements which refers to statements of services the system
should provide, how the system should react to inputs, and how the system should behave in situations.
•It may also explicitly state what the system should not do.

14. Example of
Functional
Requirements
•Example of Functional Requirements: In MHC-PMS system
which is used to maintain information about patients
receiving treatment for mental health problems, the
following are the sample functional requirements:
1. A user shall be able to search the appointments lists for all
clinics.
2. The system shall generate each day, for each clinic, a list of
patients who are expected to attend appointments that day.
3. Each staff member using the system shall be uniquely
identified by his or her eight-digit employee number.

15. Nonfunctional Requirements
•These are constraints on the services or functions offered by the
system.
•These include timing constraints, development process constraints
and constraints imposed by standards.
•These are requirements that are not directly concerned with the
specific services delivered by the system to its users.

16. Types of Non-functional Requirements
Product
Requirements
Organizational
Requirements
External
Requirements

17. Non-
functional
requirements

18. Product Requirements
•Product requirements –Specify or constrain the behavior of the
software.
•These includes performance, reliability, security and usability
requirements.

19. Organizational Requirements
Organizational requirements
–Broad system requirements
derived from policies and
procedures in the customer’s
and developer’s
organization.
These includes
environmental, operational,
and development
requirements.

20. External
requirements
•External requirements –It covers all requirements
that are derived from factors external to the system
and its development process.
•These includes regulatory, ethical, legislative,
accounting and safety/security requirements.

21. Example: Non-functional Requirements
•Example of Non-Functional Requirements: Using MHC-PMS system,
the following are the possible non-functional requirements:
A. PRODUCT REQUIREMENT
•The MHC-PMS shall be available to all clinics during normal working
hours (Mon-Fri, 8:30-17:30). Downtime within normal working hours
shall not exceed five seconds in any one day.

22. Example: Non-
functional
Requirements
B. ORGANIZATIONAL REQUIREMENT
•Users of the MHC-PMS system shall authenticate
themselves using their health authority identity card.
C. EXTERNAL REQUIREMENT
•The system shall implement patient privacy provisions as
set out in Data Privacy Act of 2012.

23. Metrics for Specifying non-functional
requirements

24. The
Requirements
Engineering
Process
•The requirements engineering process
consists of four (4) activities, which are:
1.Requirements elicitation and analysis
2.Requirements specifications,
3.Requirements validation and
4.Requirements management.

25. The
Requirements Engineering
Process

26. Requirements Elicitation
The aims of the requirements
elicitation process are to understand
the work that stakeholders do and
how they might use a new system to
help support that work.
During requirements elicitation,
software engineers work with
stakeholders to find out about the
application domain, work activities,
the services and system features
that stakeholders want, the required
performance of the system,
hardware constraints, and so on.

27. The
requirements
elicitation and
analysis
process

28. The
requirements
elicitation and
analysis
process
1.Requirements discovery and understanding.
This is the process of interacting with stakeholders of the
system to discover their requirements. Domain requirements
from stakeholders and documentation are also discovered
during this activity.
2. Requirements classification and organization.
This activity takes the unstructured collection of
requirements, groups related requirements and organizes
them into coherent clusters.

29. The
requirements
elicitation and
analysis
process
3. Requirements prioritization and negotiation.
Inevitably, when multiple stakeholders are involved,
requirements will conflict. This activity is concerned with
prioritizing requirements and finding and resolving
requirements conflicts through negotiation. Usually,
stakeholders must meet to resolve differences and agree on
compromise requirements.
4.Requirements documentation.The requirements
are documented and input into the next round of the spiral.
An early draft of the software requirements documents may
be produced at this stage, or the requirements may simply be
maintained informally on whiteboards, wikis, or other shared
spaces.

30. Requirements
elicitation
techniques
•Requirements elicitationinvolves meeting with
stakeholders of different kinds to discover information
about the proposed system.
There are two fundamental approaches to requirements
elicitation:
1. Interviewing, where you talk to people about
what they do.
2. Observation or ethnography, where you watch
people doing their job to see what artifacts they use, how
they use them, and so on.

31. Requirements
specification
•Requirements specificationis the process of writing down
the user and system requirements in a requirements
document.
•Ideally, the user and system requirements should be clear,
unambiguous, easy to understand, complete, and
consistent. In practice, this is almost impossible to achieve.
•User requirements are almost always written in natural
language supplemented by appropriate diagrams and
tables in the requirements document.

32. Requirements
specification
•The user requirementsfor a system should describe the
functional and nonfunctional requirements so that they are
understandable by system users who don’t have detailed
technical knowledge.
•System requirementsare expanded versions of the user
requirements that software engineers use as the starting
point for the system design.
•They add detail and explain how the system should
provide the user requirements.
•They may be used as part of the contract for the
implementation of the system and should therefore be
a complete and detailed specification of the whole
system.

33. Example: The
structured
specification of a
requirement for
an insulin pump