Page 128 - Software and Systems Requirements Engineering in Practice

96 S o f t w a r e & S y s t e m s R e q u i r e m e n t s E n g i n e e r i n g : I n P r a c t i c e

found that using markers to place nonfunctional requirements on a
model improve their visibility and reduce the risk that an important
nonfunctional requirement will be overlooked during design.
Once the model is complete, a properly constructed tabular set of
detailed requirements can be extracted and used as a starting point
for the creation of both project task lists and test plans. In addition, it
should be possible to generate an interface (user and software)
inventory.
Starting an MDRE Effort
When starting an MDRE effort for elicitation or analysis, it is
important to
• Define model completion.
• Understand how the model will be used and maintained after
completion—this defines what tools are needed and how
they are to be integrated.
• Have the appropriate standards and procedures available.
Modeling style is important. Without guidelines or directions,
analysts might create models that cannot be used effectively
for requirements generation, metrics extraction, or data
mining.
• Have at least one person on the team to act as a facilitator
who has been through a complete MDRE cycle.
• Have the desired tool set in place and ready to use.
Organization of a model is key to performing programmatic
verification and requirements extraction. It is important to have the
goal of a coherent verifiable model in mind throughout the analysis
effort and model construction process. The knowledge contained in
an analysis model is valuable to an organization and can be
disseminated by publishing to the web. The heuristics described in
the following sections will make a model more understandable by
making navigation intuitive.

Managing Elicitation and Analysis Sessions
With MDRE, the management of elicitation and analysis sessions is
done using the same process, although the participants may be
different. Initially, subject matter experts, the team lead, and analysts
will participate. At the initial kickoff meeting, the team lead should
describe to the core team how the sessions will be run, and provide
examples of MDRE artifacts. Thus, the team lead will
• Review guidelines and procedures such as style guides for
content and revise (offline) as necessary.
• Describe the modeling techniques and tools to be used.