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List and explain seven distinct tasks of requirement engineering

Requirement Engineering comprises seven distinct tasks that collectively ensure the proper capture, analysis, and management of system requirements. These tasks form a comprehensive framework for understanding and documenting what the system should do.

1. Requirements Inception​

This initial task involves establishing the context and foundation for the requirements process.

  • Identifying key stakeholders and their roles in the requirements process
  • Defining the project scope and boundaries
  • Establishing communication channels between developers and customers
  • Setting up the requirements process methodology and tools
  • Creating initial vision documents to guide subsequent activities

2. Requirements Elicitation​

This task focuses on gathering raw requirements from various sources.

  • Interviewing stakeholders to understand their needs and expectations
  • Conducting workshops and focus groups to brainstorm requirements
  • Observing current systems and processes to identify improvement areas
  • Analyzing documents related to existing systems or business processes
  • Creating questionnaires and surveys to gather information from a broad audience
  • Developing prototypes to stimulate discussion and discover requirements

3. Requirements Elaboration​

This task involves refining and expanding the gathered requirements.

  • Clarifying ambiguous requirements through stakeholder discussions
  • Decomposing high-level requirements into more detailed specifications
  • Prioritizing requirements based on importance, urgency, and dependencies
  • Identifying relationships between different requirements
  • Developing scenarios and use cases to describe system behavior
  • Detecting and resolving conflicts between competing requirements

4. Requirements Negotiation​

This task addresses conflicts and disagreements among stakeholders regarding requirements.

  • Facilitating discussions between stakeholders with conflicting needs
  • Identifying tradeoffs between competing requirements
  • Reaching consensus on prioritization and scope
  • Managing stakeholder expectations about what can be delivered
  • Establishing criteria for resolving future requirements conflicts
  • Documenting decisions and rationales for requirements choices

5. Requirements Specification​

This task involves documenting the requirements in a formal, structured manner.

  • Creating a Software Requirements Specification (SRS) document
  • Employing formal or semi-formal notation where appropriate
  • Defining functional and non-functional requirements precisely
  • Specifying system interfaces and external dependencies
  • Establishing quality attributes and performance criteria
  • Developing models (data models, process models, behavioral models) to represent requirements

6. Requirements Validation​

This task ensures that the documented requirements are correct, complete, and aligned with stakeholder needs.

  • Reviewing requirements documents with stakeholders
  • Performing technical reviews to assess feasibility
  • Testing requirements through prototypes or simulations
  • Checking for completeness, consistency, and clarity
  • Validating that requirements meet business objectives
  • Conducting formal inspections of requirements documents

7. Requirements Management​

This ongoing task involves tracking and controlling changes to requirements throughout the project lifecycle.

  • Establishing a requirements baseline for development
  • Creating a change control process for requirements
  • Tracking requirement status and implementation progress
  • Maintaining requirements traceability to design, code, and tests
  • Managing versions of requirements documents
  • Assessing the impact of proposed changes on project scope, schedule, and resources
  • Communicating requirement changes to all relevant stakeholders

Each of these tasks contributes to creating a comprehensive and accurate set of requirements that form the foundation for successful system development. Though presented sequentially, these tasks are often performed iteratively and may overlap during the requirement engineering process.