Page 22 - Software and Systems Requirements Engineering in Practice

Preface

oday’s software and systems engineers are facing an increasing
number of challenges as they attempt to develop new products
Tand systems faster, with higher quality and rich feature content.
Part of these challenges are created by advances in computing
technology, as processors and memory become faster and less
expensive. Along with increased processing capability, there is an
expectation that today’s systems will do more. As more features are
being defined for a product or system, the discipline of requirements
engineering has increased in importance to help manage the
development of the features throughout the product life cycle.
This book was written to help provide an understanding of the
challenges in requirements engineering (RE) that are facing industrial
practitioners and to present some best practices for coping with those
challenges. Many texts on RE generally do a good job covering the
basics of RE, but they may not adequately discuss the real-world
problems that can make requirements elicitation, analysis, and
management difficult. For example, Siemens products are typically
defined with at least several thousand recorded requirements.
Complex Department of Defense projects are sometimes reported as
having 100,000 requirements or more in their project database.
Managing projects of this size is very difficult, and managing the
requirements on such a project can be quite daunting. The trend is
toward defining more requirements, but developers often struggle
with managing them, especially as requirements are added or
changed during the development life cycle. Unfortunately, problems
of scale often do not always appear on a project until it is too late to
easily change process, tooling, or infrastructure. It is hoped that some
of the techniques described in this book will be of use to industrial
practitioners for helping to make project managers aware of potential
problems before they happen, and providing techniques and guidance
for successfully navigating the many pitfalls associated with large,
complex projects.

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