REQUIREMENTS Engineering
PROCESSES AND TECHNIQUES

Gerald Kotonya and Ian Sommerville

This book is a  textbook, published in May 1998 by  John Wiley & Sons. It covers all aspects of the software requirements engineering process. It has been written for undergraduate and graduate students and for practising software engineers who need an introduction to requirements engineering. The processes which are discussed in the book include requirements elicitation and analysis, requirements validation and requirements management. Techniques which are covered include structured methods for requirements engineering, viewpoint-oriented methods, the specification of non-functional requirements and the specification of interactive systems.

You can read the Prefaceand browse the Contents of the book. The book has an associated set of OHP Transparencies (Powerpoint 4) and solutions to selected exercises which may be downloaded.  The VORD method which is introduced in the book as a viewpoint-oriented technique for interactive systems specification has an associated toolset, written in Java, which is available free of charge for all readers of the book.

Download the VORD toolset.
 

FAQs about the book

WHY was the book written?
The value of introducing requirements engineering to trainee software engineers is to equip them for the real world of software and systems development.

WHAT is involved in requirements engineering?
As a discipline, newly emerging from software engineering, there are a range of vews on where requirements engineering starts and finishes and what it encompass. The book offers comprehensive coverage of the requirements engineering process to date - from initial requirements elicitation through to requirements validation.

HOW and WHICH methods should I use for requirements engineering?
As there is no single catch-all technique applicable to all types of system, requirements engineers need to know about a range of different techniques. Tried and tested techniques such as data-flow and object-oriented models are covered here as well as some promising new ones. They are all based on real systems descriptions to demonstrate the applicability of the approach.

WHO should read the book?
Principally intended for senior undergraduate and graduate students studying computer science, software engineering or systems engineering, this text will also be helpful to those in industry who are new to requirements engineering. Experienced requirements engineers may find the companion text, Requirements Engineering: A Good Practice Guide to be more useful.

About the authors


Gerald Kotonya is a lecturer in the Department of Computing at Lancaster University. His principal research interests are in component-based software engineering, requirements engineering, rapid application development, and safety-critical systems.
 
 


Ian Sommerville is now a professor at St. Andrews. His main research interests are in requirements engineering, critical systems and systems evolution.







More on requirements engineering

We are convinced that students and experienced requirements engineers look for different things from a book so we have written a companion text to this (Requirements Engineering: A Good Practice Guide by Ian Sommerville and Pete Sawyer) which focuses on  the practice of requirements engineering and which includes over 100 good practice guidelines for requirements engineering process improvement. This book's web site includes a set of links to other requirements engineering resources.

We have deliberately omitted detailed information about tools from the book as the market changes so quickly. Some tool suppliers for requirements management tools are: