Latest Requirements Buzz

Requirements Visualization: A New Trend?


Getting Your Requirements Right: Collaborate With Stakeholders To Work Smarter
Given the economic downturn, "cheaper, better, faster" seems to be a universal mantra in business. To stay competitive, organizations must continually strive to be more agile and develop higher-quality solutions more quickly-despite obstacles such as geographically distributed teams, limited budgets and resources, quick delivery times, language barriers and government regulations. These challenges require teams to consider new ways of doing business so they can be more responsive to frequent business changes. One area that businesses can optimize is their software development processes. If th...

Experiences in Eliciting Security Requirements
There are many requirements elicitation methods, but we seldom see elicitation performed specifically for security requirements. One reason for this is that few elicitation methods are specifically directed at security requirements. Another factor is that organizations seldom address security requirements elicitation specifically and instead lump them in with other traditional requirements elicitation methods. This article describes an approach for doing trade-off analysis among requirements elicitation methods. Several case studies were conducted in security requirements elicitation; the det...

Ensuring Requirements Gathering Success in an Agile Environment
Quality requirements contribute to the success of agile and traditional project management projects. The requirements definition process followed in a traditional project management framework and the features-based storyboarding that is typical of agile approaches are different, but they also have many similarities. The actual process used to define and gather requirements may be different, but the criteria for quality requirements remain constant. What are these similarities and differences in the process of gathering requirements? What happens to the role of the business analyst in an agile ...

Call for Papers: Requirements Engineering Education and Training
The 4th International Workshop on Requirements Engineering Education and Training (REET09) Held in conjunction with the 17th International Requirements Engineering Conference (RE09). The workshop will be held in Atlanta, Georgia, USA on August 31, 2009.  

The Value of Requirements Traceability
As the process of capturing and documenting business requirements matures, there is often a watershed moment when an organization must decide whether to perform traceability of requirements as part of that process. Most companies involved with a formal methodology for software development utilize some degree of traceability; but those not familiar with it could be put off by the overhead of requirements management (RM), of which traceability is a component. Therefore, it helps to understand some of the value aspects of instituting traceability.

12th Australian Workshop on Requirements Engineering


Business Requirements Should Drive Technology Investments
A business-driven technology strategy articulates the capabilities required for the success of an organization. To align your business-technology investments with your business strategy, you should focus on the type of value you want to create Decisions on business-technology investments require structured thinking about what the business wants to achieve. This clear understanding of business requirements dictates the business-technology plans and investments needed to execute the company’s business strategy.  

A Lean and Scalable Requirements Information Model for the Agile Enterprise
Agile development practices introduced, adopted and extended the XP-originated "User Story" as the primary currency for expressing application requirements within the agile enterprise. The just-in-time application of the user story simplified software development and eliminated the prior waterfall like practices of overly burdensome and overly constraining requirements specifications for agile teams. However, as powerful as this innovative concept is, the user story by itself does not provide an adequate, nor sufficiently lean, construct for reasoning about investment, system-level requiremen...

Engineering Security Requirements
Most requirements engineers are poorly trained to elicit, analyze, and specify security requirements, often confusing them with the architectural security mechanisms that are traditionally used to fulfill them. They thus end up specifying architecture and design constraints rather than true security requirements.