Page 24 - Software and Systems Requirements Engineering in Practice

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be carefully documented, traced, reviewed, and tested. We have also
had to develop expertise on subjects that are not commonly taught at
universities, such as hazard analysis.
Requirements engineering has become more complicated over
time as the complexity of the products we desire to develop has
increased. Thus, the requirements engineer is continually challenged
by issues of scale, unstable requirements, product complexity, and
managing change. Our experience has resulted from the opportunities
to work on, for example, a project that is defining the requirements
for an automobile infotainment system and then a few months later a
project that is defining the requirements for a medical imaging
system.

How to Use This Book
Our experience is with requirements engineering for products,
systems, and services; typically (but not always) with high software
content. This book contains RE methods, processes, and rules of
thumb that have been derived from observed best practices of RE
across many such projects. Thus, this book is meant for software and
systems engineering professionals who are interested in learning new
or validating their current techniques for RE. Such professionals
include practicing requirements engineers, who should benefit most
from the best practices discussed. But, the book material may also be
useful to other engineering professionals, such as system architects,
testers, developers, and engineering managers. The book may be
useful to “not quite yet” practitioners such as graduate students in
software engineering, systems engineering, or computer science. We
would also hope that product or marketing managers would receive
valuable information from this book as they struggle with bringing
new products to a competitive market.
In order to focus on best practices and techniques for the
practitioner, there is very little introductory material presented, but
pointers are given to reference books that cover basic software
engineering concepts. Thus, users of this book typically would have
at least an undergraduate degree in computer science, systems or
software engineering and some experience developing systems.