Requirements engineering

Requirements engineering (RE) is the process of defining, documenting, and maintaining requirements in the engineering design process. It is a common role in systems engineering and software engineering. The first use of the term requirements engineering was probably in 1964 in the conference paper "Maintenance, Maintainability, and System Requirements Engineering", but it did not come into general use until the late 1990s with the publication of an IEEE Computer Society tutorial in March 1997 and the establishment of a conference series on requirements engineering that has evolved into the International Requirements Engineering Conference. In the waterfall model, requirements engineering is presented as the first phase of the development process. Later development methods, including the Rational Unified Process (RUP) for software, assume that requirements engineering continues through a system's lifetime. Requirements management, which is a sub-function of Systems Engineering practices, is also indexed in the International Council on Systems Engineering (INCOSE) manuals. The activities involved in requirements engineering vary widely, depending on the type of system being developed and the organization's specific practice(s) involved. These may include: Requirements inception or requirements elicitation – Developers and stakeholders meet; the latter are inquired concerning their needs and wants regarding the software product. Requirements analysis and negotiation – Requirements are identified (including new ones if the development is iterative), and conflicts with stakeholders are solved. Both written and graphical tools (the latter commonly used in the design phase, but some find them helpful at this stage, too) are successfully used as aids. Examples of written analysis tools: use cases and user stories. Examples of graphical tools: UML and LML. System modeling – Some engineering fields (or specific situations) require the product to be completely designed and modeled before its construction or fabrication starts.