Page 21 - Software and Systems Requirements Engineering in Practice

xx 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

What is most difficult is to standardize the process of requirements
engineering, since requirements engineering is at the very beginning
of a project when so much is unclear. Therefore, in industrial software
development, it is important to come up with a requirements
engineering approach that is on the one hand flexible but on the other
hand gives enough methodological guidance.
In scientific research, exploring requirements engineering has
been an active field for many years. However, at least in the beginning,
requirements engineering was sometimes misunderstood as a
discipline, which only has to document and specify requirements but
neglects the necessary decision making. This ignores the difficulty of
coming up with a requirements specification that takes into account
all issues from functionality to quality and cost. There are even
process development issues to consider, such as certification
requirements or product constraints dealing with given operating
systems or software reuse.
As a result of all these considerations, the software engineering
group of Siemens Corporate Research in Princeton, New Jersey,
decided a few years ago to concentrate their research on a broad
spectrum of requirements engineering themes. I had the privilege to
work extensively with this group of engineers and researchers, who
gained a lot of experience in requirements engineering on coaching,
teaching, and consulting methods in ongoing Siemens projects. Some
of the projects are very large scale. It is helpful that the software
engineering group in Princeton is not just focused on the core topics of
requirements engineering but also covers closely related aspects such
as architectural design, quality assurance, testing, model-based
software development, and prototyping. Doing so, the group is looking
at a systematic foundation to requirements engineering by creating a
requirements engineering reference model, which helps to list all the
necessary content in the requirements engineering process while at the
same time providing flexibility by tailoring and by a choice of methods.
It is a pleasure to see the results of the requirements engineering
research and practice at Siemens Corporate Research documented in
this book. It describes a lot of precious experiences, principles, and
the state of the practice in industry. As such, it is quite unique and
complements existing academic books on requirements engineering,
which look more at the basic terminology and approaches.
I hope that this book will help in many respects development teams
around the world to improve their industrial requirements engineering.
It is a pleasure for me to thank the authors and the members of Siemens
Corporate Research for a scientifically fruitful cooperation over the last
six years and to congratulate them on this book, which is a milestone in
the field of industrial requirements engineering.
Manfred Broy
Professor of Software and Systems Engineering
Technical University of Munich