Software Requirements Elicitation and Specification

Requirement elicitation: Is the first step of creating a project. The client tells the programmer what they expect the program to do and how to do it. The information can be retrieved by interviews, observation, brainstorming, etc. The general process can be described as Discovering the needs of the costumer. (Discovering the needs of the costumer)
Requirement specification: This is the process of documenting the previous requirements and analyzing them in order to optimize the project

Goldsmith, R. (2015). Use elicitation techniques to discover software requirements. October 28th, 2016, de Search Software quality Sitio web: http://searchsoftwarequality.techtarget.com/feature/Use-elicitation-techniques-to-discover-software-requirements

Rouse, M. (2007). software requirements specification (SRS). October 28th, 2016, de Search Quality Software Sitio web: http://searchsoftwarequality.techtarget.com/definition/software-requirements-specification

Requirements Elicitation and Specification

Elic… what? that sounds complicated. Well, it actually isn’t. I’ve talked about functional and non-functional requirements before, but this is something completely different.

As you may remember, the first step of the SDLC is collecting infomation, requirements elicitation and specification are part of this step.

Requirement elicitation, is actually the first thing you have to do in the software life-cycle and is the practice of finding out what the customer or user wants. In an informal concept, is more like a wish list of requirements. But there are many problems that are almost impossible to avoid because it depends more of the customer, for example: he doesn’t know exactly what he wants, he thinks that some specifications are obvious or his needs changed and want the software to do something else.

Requirements elicitation practices include:

Interviews
Questionnaires
User observation
Workshops
Brainstorming
Use cases
Role playing
Prototyping

Once you know what the customer wants, you’ll be able to do the software requirement specification (SRS), which is a process of recording the client’s requirements in any form, like a document, a graphical representation, a graph, a pie, a cake, brownies, etc.

SRS also contains the functional and non-functional requirements and other specification types, for example: performance, maintainability, reliability, resource, etc.

Sources:

http://www.tutorialspoint.com/software_engineering/software_requirements.htm

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Requirements_elicitation

http://resources.sei.cmu.edu/library/asset-view.cfm?assetID=12553

Essentials of Elicitation & Specification

The first step of the Software Development Lifecycle is Functional & non Functional Requirement Gathering , it is the result from the specification of the informal ideas a client has about a product. The goals of this phase are to define the needed software and hardware. It is a really important phase because failures at this stage may increase the cost of development in higher stages to ensure the customer needs.

gerard.rendell - Elicitation — gerard.rendell –
Elicitation

There are two factors to consider:

Initial Input: The idea of how a system will be created considering the needs of the client and defining a problem to be solved.

Desired Output: The requirements must be as specific as possible so the problem that needs to be solved can be completely understood.

Requirements Elicitation is mainly understanding and analyzing all of the requirements a client has for a system. Developers & engineers work closely with clients to understand the problems that need to be solved and what functionality a system should have and what hardware is optimal.

The problem is that clients usually do not have a clear idea of what they want or need and if there are many stakeholders, they will most surely have conflicting ideas. The conditions need to be met for the client to be able to solve a specific problem or achieve a certain objective and it must satisfy specific contracts, standards and specifications.

Requirements Elicitation – basic customer idea and definition.

Requirements Specification – Basic developer design and technical specifications.

Requirement analysis normaly uses one of two models: Dynamic model or Object Model. These specifications use formal (exact mathematical syntax or semanic syntax) or semi-formal notation (like UML).

In general this is a phase of understanding the stated problem that the client has and how it should be Continue reading "Essentials of Elicitation & Specification" →