REQUIREMENTS
ENGINEERING
A Good Practice Guide
Ian Sommerville
& Pete Sawyer
Specific topics in requirements engineering
This page contains links to information on some of the specific topics
addressed by the book. Note that these are organised by Chapter headings.
Hence, for example, you will find links to information on traceability
under "Requirements management". Note, however, that we have
been unable to find good on-line resources for some topics. If you know
of any, we'll be glad to hear from you.
Practical Process Improvement
Despite the enormous interest in process improvement, there is relatively
little information which is specific to requirements engineering. However,
there is much information on general process improvement strategies, models
and standards. The CMM and ISO 900 have had by far the most impact.
- The SEI Capability Maturity Model (CMM).
This is what started it all and is required reading for anyone interested
in software process improvement. Technical reports describing the CMM are
available direct from the site. The site also includes articles on, and
links to, other process improvement models.
- ISO 9000. ISO 9000 is a standard for quality management processes
for which software engineering - specific variants have been developed.
Several comparisons of ISO 9000 and the CMM have been made, including one
downloadable from the CMM site above.
- Ami. Ami
is a quantitative approach to software project management and process improvement.
It integrates the concepts of software process maturity assessment and
goal-oriented measurement into a twelve-step method targeted at the business
goals of an organisation. Ami was developed as part of an Esprit project
and has a following in Europe, a user group and a handbook.
- SPICE. SPICE
is an on-going initiative to develop an international Standard for Software
Process Assessment. It aims to integrate all important existing process
improvement standards. The SEI site above includes downloadable articles
on SPICE, including one comparing it to the CMM.
- Bootstrap. Bootstrap is a European variant of the CMM. It is
supported by the Bootsrap
institute.
- The Process
Improvement Good Practice Guide. Like Requirements Engineering A
Good Practice Guide, this has been developed as part of the REAIMS
project. It has not been published commercially but this link provides
information on how to obtain both a public domain version and consultancy
based on the full document.
- The US DoD (the main sponsors of the CMM) Data Analysis Centre for
Software (DACS) maintain a useful set of resources on software process
improvement. This can be accessed via our Requirements
engineering in general page.
The Requirements Document
- An extensive summary of requirements standards is given in Standards,
Guidelines and Examples on System and Software Requirements Engineering
(M. Dorfman and R. H. Thayer, IEEE
press, 1990). The IEEE's own standard, IEEE STD 830-1993 IEEE Recommended
Practice for Software Requirements Specifications is also available
from this site.
- The RequisitePro requirements management tool includes templates for
IEEE STD 830-1993. See Requirements
Management.
Requirements Elicitation
- Viewpoints as a requirements elicitation mechanism are covered under
Viewpoints below.
- QuestMap from Corporate Memory Systems Inc. is a hypertext-based groupware tool. Among its features
is the ability to record and maintain arguments and this can be exploited
to support requirements elicitation by tracking the incremental acretion
of requirements information from different sources and by different engineers.
- Issues in Requirements Elicitation (M. Christel and K. Kang
SEI Technical Report No: SEI-92-TR-012)
is a good downloadable overview of some of the problems inherent in this
difficult area.
System Modelling
Requirements Validation
Requirements Management
- The following are links to commercial requirements management tools.
Requirements
Engineering for Critical Systems
- The World-Wide
Web Virtual Library: Safety Critical Systems provides a comprehensive
set of links and resources. These have a safety slant, and are not only
concerned with requirements. However, the page includes links to resources
on dependability and computing risks in general as well as links to formal
specification pages (see Formal Specification
below).
- Several methods developed by the REAIMS
project explicitly address the problems of requirements engineering for
critical systems.
System Modelling
with Structured Methods
- Information on structured methods is widely available. However, if
you are interested in object-oriented methods, you might be interested
in the new Unified Modelling
Language (UML) which aims to combine the best features of OMT and Booch.
Formal Specification
Viewpoints
- Information on PREview, the viewpoint method used in the examples in
the book, is available from the REAIMS web pages. This also includes links
to other papers on PREview.
- One of the predecessors of PREview was VORD.
This has not been superceeded by PREview. Rather, it is a viewpoint-oriented
method aimed specifically at interactive systems while PREview is aimed
at more general software and systems engineering domains.
- For an up-to-the-minute snapshot of other developments in viewpoints,
the proceedings of a 1996 workshop on viewpoints, Viewpoints
96, are available on-line. This includes contributions from many of
the principal researchers in the field, including Finkelstein, Jackson,
Leite, Mullery and Nuseibeh.