R

EQUIREMENT ENGINEERING

  (RE) refers to the process of defining, documenting and maintaining

software requirements

and to the subfield of

Software Engineering

concerned with this process. According to book "No Silver Bullet: Essence and Accidents of

Software Engineering

" chapter 20, "The hardest single part of building a software system is deciding precisely what to build. No other part of the conceptual work is as difficult as establishing the

detailed technical requirements

. . . No other part of the work so cripples the resulting system if done wrong. No other part is as difficult to rectify later"

So wrote Fred Brooks in 1987, and so it remains today [Davis 1990a, Faulk 1997a]. "The inability to produce complete, correct, and

unambiguous software requirements

is still considered the major cause of software failure today.

Requirements

are statements of what the system must do, how it must behave, the properties it must exhibit, the qualities it must possess, and the constraints that the system and its development must satisfy. The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) defines a requirement as:

1. a condition or capability needed by a user to solve a problem or achieve an objective.
2. a condition or capability that must be met or possessed by a system or system component to satisfy a contract, standard, specification, or other formally imposed document.
3. a documented representation of a condition or capability as in definition 1 or 2

Requirement Engineering

emphasizes the use of systematic and repeatable techniques that ensure the completeness, consistency, and relevance of the system requirements [Sommerville 1997a]. Specifically,

Requirement Engineering

encompasses requirements elicitation, analysis, specification, verification, and management, where

• Requirements elicitation

  is the process of discovering, reviewing, documenting, and understanding the user's needs and constraints for the system.

• Requirements analysis

  is the process of refining the user's needs and constraints.

• Requirements specification

  is the process of documenting the user's needs and constraints clearly and precisely.

• Requirements verification

  is the process of ensuring that the system requirements are complete, correct, consistent, and clear.

• Requirements management

  is the process of scheduling, coordinating, and documenting the requirements engineering activities (that is, elicitation, analysis, specification, and verification).

Some deals does not reach the success due to non-awareness to ones requirements. A customer who order for a software development also does not know about what is he going to order or what all of his requirements are. hence, his order does not get success to be finished successfully. So, either he should be aware completely about what he is need and can leave his all of his company or

business requirements

confidently or, he may call an

requirement engineer

.

Requirement engineer

may be call for long projects i.e. Governments Organizations Software etc. Also sometimes a school or college can hire

requirement engineer

to generate or write out his requirements list for a school or college management system software. Sometimes, a college/university develops a software but later on changing any university rules may require re-development or improvements on his software. So, if you want to think for future, then probably you should call a

requirement engineer

to describe best requirements for your business software. It costs not so much but can save your money for future software updates/re-development or improvements. It is useful for both sides for the customer and the development company because if the company is aware of the requirements for a project he can probably develop the project in better way rather than if he is not sure about your software requirements.