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All articles (105)

Splitting Requirements at Scale

Analysis means breaking down large problems into smaller, more manageable ones. We, as BAs, understand intuitively that this is what we do and that how well we […]

Gareth Rogers 12. September 2023

Conversation with an Artificial Intelligence

This last decade has seen several breakthroughs in Artificial Intelligence (AI), in particular machine learning, with groundbreaking applications in all […]

Camille Salinesi 17. May 2023

Mission Possible

Initial situation We just can't get rid of them in certain areas: non-functional requirements (NFR) - quality requirements (QR) according to IREB. Whether in […]

Rainer Grau 14. December 2022

A General Systems Thinking Perspective on the CPRE

Adding the concept of observer to the definition of the system in the CPRE can extend, simplify and justify the discussions about points of view, shared […]

Gil Regev, Alain Wegmann, Olivier Hayard 14. September 2022

Integrating Business Events into your Agile Framework

Business Event partitioning has been around for a long time and has helped Business Analysts to improve their requirements discovery and to develop better […]

Suzanne Robertson, James Robertson 10. February 2022

Discovering System Requirements through SysML

For Business Analysts/Requirement Engineers/System Analysts, the greatest innovation brought by the Systems Modeling Language (SysML) is the introduction of 1) […]

Gildas Premel-Cabic 15. September 2021

Inputs to requirements engineering in agile projects

Practices from the Agile software development (ASD) spectrum are adopted by enterprises worldwide for project and product development. Either adopting […]

Nuno Santos, Nuno Ferreira, Ricardo J. Machado 30. June 2021

Requirements Engineering and Domain Knowledge

1 Introduction The IREB [1] Foundation Level courses emphasize the fact that a requirements engineer is expected to familiarize himself with the application […]

Till-J. Faßold 25. February 2021

Requirements Engineering in Job Offers

How is Requirements Engineering (RE) perceived and staffed in practice? What is the job title of the position doing RE? What tasks does this position include? […]

Andrea Herrmann, Maya Daneva, Chong Wang, Nelly Condori-Fernandez 16. September 2020

Interview with John Mylopoulos

Preface of the Editor in Chief Perhaps it is like carrying coals to Newcastle when we briefly introduce John Mylopoulos in this preface to the following […]

Luisa Mich 14. May 2020

How Will It Work?

In a previous article Business Analysis Viewpoints [1] we discussed a number of ways of looking at systems. The intention of these viewpoints is to make it […]

Suzanne Robertson, James Robertson 19. March 2020

Mastering Business Requirements

From the community for the community „Question existing work methods and solutions and rethink them at the beginning of projects — it will never be so […]

David Gilbert, Dirk Röder 05. November 2019

ReqInspector

During the process of requirements engineering, incompletely specified requirements require iterative follow-up discussions with stakeholders to complete and […]

Andreas Maier, Simon Darting 27. June 2019

Is there something missing?

Introduction With the exponential number of international projects and the rising complexity of the products being developed, sharing a common language among […]

Kristina Schöne, Andreas Günther, Margaux Sagne 28. March 2019

When the rubber hits the road

Introduction There are a number of quality criteria for requirements. IREB Syllabus [1] groups them into three aspects: content, documentation and agreement. […]

Grigory Grin 27. February 2019

On the right track

For quite some time, IREB has promoted a partner program for companies worldwide who value sound requirements engineering and align the qualifications of their […]

Hans van Loenhoud 18. December 2018

Discover Quality Requirements with the Mini-QAW

Good quality requirements help software engineers make the right architectural design decisions. Unfortunately, collecting requirements is not always easy. The […]

Thijmen de Gooijer, Michael Keeling, Will Chaparro 08. November 2018

REQM guidance matrix

Requirements Management (REQM) is described as a key area for several disciplines: Enterprise Architecture, Business Analysis, Software Engineering and Process […]

Fabrício Laguna 12. September 2017

Sharing My Doubts on the Focus of Requirements

In my last commentary I promised to provide a justification for why I restricted my consideration of requirements to the desired system/product, and neglected […]

Karol Frühauf 12. September 2017

The goal is to solve the problem

A requirement is "a condition or capability needed by a user to solve a problem or to achieve an objective" (AKA a goal), see the CPRE Glossary [Glinz 2014]. […]

Hans van Loenhoud, Kim Lauenroth, Patrick Steiger 12. September 2017

To Brainstorm or Not to Brainstorm

"Creativity is the essential skillset for the future" [Batey]. In a world that is increasingly dominated by smart ecosystems, like autonomous cars able to warn […]

Inge Kress, Anja Schwarz 12. September 2017

Biased Toddlers

“Biased? No, as a requirements engineer I strive to be impartial and unbiased”, right? But really being impartial and unbiased is extremely difficult! That is, […]

Manon Penning 21. February 2017

Functional Requirements and their levels of granularity

The level of granularity is the greater or lesser extent in the description of expected software behaviour in a functional specification. It defines how […]

Guilherme Siqueira Simões, Carlos Eduardo Vazquez 21. February 2017

Making “agiLE” Work

As more large enterprises are adopting agile practices organization-wide, they face unique challenges when compared to smaller organizations or individual […]

Joy Beatty, Candase Hokanson 21. February 2017

Sharing My Doubts on Goals and Requirements

A popular discussion in requirements engineering courses is about the difference between goals and requirements. One view is that goals are requirements on the […]

Karol Frühauf 21. February 2017

The Business Case for Agile Business Analysis

Over the years, I have often been asked to ‘make the business case for agile Business Analysis’. Sometimes it comes up in a meeting with executives, as it did […]

Howard Podeswa 21. February 2017

Tracing Change Requests

One of the biggest challenges in software maintenance is the need to trace incoming change requests to the code affected by those requests. This need is […]

Harry Sneed, Birgit Demuth 21. February 2017

Improving the Use of English in Requirements

For most international industries, English is the main language of communication in technical documents. Among them, requirements are specifically designed to […]

Marie Garnier, Patrick Saint-Dizier 18. October 2016

Modeling Requirements with Constraints

Modeling requirements is not really new, but there are many ways to do it. We discovered constraints as a powerful concept that allowed us to create concise […]

Michael Jastram, Andreas Kara 18. October 2016

Requirements Engineering in German Job Advertisements

How is requirements engineering (RE) perceived and staffed in practice? What is the job title of the position doing RE? Which further tasks does this position […]

Andrea Herrmann, Marcel Weber 18. October 2016

Sharing My Doubts on Shall / Should / Will etc.

I doubt whether it is always useful to include the priority in the wording of a requirement. A requirement expresses a need that a future system is supposed to […]

Karol Frühauf 18. October 2016

The Context-Canvas

Digitalization is becoming increasingly prevalent in manufacturing industries. Co-working mechanical engineers and computer scientists are aware of the […]

Oliver Stypa, Sebastian Schlaus 18. October 2016

Managing the Invisible

Software quality consists of many different aspects. Some of these aspects, like functional correctness or learnability, can be directly perceived and thus […]

Gunnar Harde 15. June 2016

NLP for Requirements Engineers, Part 2

Unquestionably, being a good communicator helps in achieving greater impact and efficiency in the requirements engineering line of work. NLP comes from the […]

Corrine Thomas, Albena Georgieva 15. June 2016

Sharing My Doubts on Acceptance Criteria

I doubt whether I understand what “acceptance criteria” are. I have no doubts how I interpret the term. In my interpretation, they have nearly nothing to do […]

Karol Frühauf 15. June 2016

NLP for Requirements Engineers, Part 1

Unquestionably, being a good communicator helps in achieving greater impact and efficiency in the requirements engineering line of work. NLP comes from the […]

Corrine Thomas, Albena Georgieva 29. February 2016

RE in Agile Projects: Survey Results

Though Requirements Engineering (RE) and Agile are sometimes perceived to be conflicting approaches to software development, the recent emergence of the term […]

Gareth Rogers 29. February 2016

The Genius Toddler Challenge

“How hard can it be?” is a question posed by virtually everybody at one point or another regarding a line of work they are currently not involved in. We all […]

Manon Penning 29. February 2016

What makes Women Better BAs

“Whatever women do they must do twice as well as men to be thought half as good. Luckily, this is not difficult.” (Charlotte Whitton, Canadian feminist and […]

Sandra Leek 29. February 2016

An “agile” lifecycle for requirements

In a previous article [1], we claimed that at least in certain circumstances, for certain types of systems, the requirements management discipline is still […]

Rodolphe Arthaud 29. October 2015

Cyber Security Requirements Engineering

Sophisticated functionality and ever-increasing perfection of embedded and distributed IT systems have been made possible through an increasing amount of […]

Christof Ebert 29. October 2015

IT Requirements when Buying, not Making

Procuring off-the-shelf or COTS software is often the only feasible route to access new facilities, due to the reduced time, cost, risk and organisational […]

Martin Tate 29. October 2015

Requirements Engineering Workshop in Mozambique

In January 2015 we got a request to support an educational program in Maputo – Mozambique. The Maputo region is part of a country suffering from a long lasting […]

Lars Baumann, Henrik Baumann 29. October 2015

Stable? Fragile? Agile! Attractive but reasonable

Classical process models have come closer to agile values in IT-projects over the last years, and thus a new project reality has been created. This new reality […]

Chris Rupp, Ulrike Friedrich 29. October 2015

Survival Kit for the RE Guy

In the context of that ubiquitous, all-situations-encompassing real world, the Requirements Engineer might move in and out of several concurrent projects, work […]

Deepti Savio 29. October 2015

Requirements Elicitation (ReqElic) in My Company

Have you ever wondered what is the optimal size for a group of business or requirements analysts that is doing creative requirements elicitation? Have you […]

Luisa Mich, Victoria Sakhnini, Daniel Berry 30. July 2015

Requirements under construction

Eliciting requirements is a key skill in requirements engineering. A requirements engineer is supposed elicit requirements in a way that is both unbiased and […]

Chris Rupp, Kristina Schöne 30. July 2015

The Business Analysis Center of Excellence

Usually, the disciplines of business analysis and requirements engineering start somewhat hidden inside companies: A customer service specialist supports the […]

Christoph Wolf 30. July 2015

Agility and Obligation

Many clients believe in fixed price agreements with well-defined requirements specifications in order to control the outcome and costs of software development. […]

Gunnar Harde 30. April 2015

Building in security instead of testing it in

There are a numerous techniques for eliciting and documenting functional requirements. We all know interviews, workshops, questionnaires and studying […]

Edward van Deursen, Jan Jaap Cannegieter 30. April 2015

LELIE

When writing or revising a set of requirements, or any technical document, it is particularly challenging to make sure that texts read easily and are […]

Patrick Saint-Dizier, Juyeon Kang 30. April 2015

Mobile RE

This year we’re definitely headed for the future. Do you remember the 1985 movie Back to the Future? Marty McFly lands in Hill Valley, California on October […]

Ursula Meseberg, Tanja Weiß 30. April 2015

Modeling Requirements with SysML

In this paper, we will show how the SysML modeling language can be useful to complement the requirements process, i.e. to better define and trace requirements. […]

Pascal Roques 30. April 2015

RE in Agile Projects: a Survey

Is Requirements Engineering alive and well within your Agile projects, or have zealous consultants and scrum masters consigned your hard-earned RE skills to […]

Gareth Rogers 30. April 2015

Agile Product Ownership

The key to product success is to discover and deliver the right product for the right customers—and to do it at the right time. That doesn’t change when you […]

Ellen Gottesdiener 29. January 2015

Agility and Obligation

Developing software is a complex task. Especially the interaction between client and contractor is very challenging because de facto the client cannot […]

Gunnar Harde 29. January 2015

Catching the worm

In early project phases it is one of the main objectives to evaluate whether or not it is reasonable to conduct the project from an economic standpoint. […]

Carl Friedrich Kress 29. January 2015

Bridging communication gaps with a Feature Tree

We are in the machine industry. A company was willing to change the working mode of the software development department as part of a huge Research and […]

Ina Paschen, Emmerich Fuchs 29. January 2015

Requirements Engineering and Agile

These days a growing number of people are becoming interested in agile product development. Many people work in an agile environment, or would like to do so. […]

Sven van der Zee 29. January 2015

The Recover Approach

The alignment between requirements and tests and the need for explicit requirements specifications to better support knowledge management in software projects […]

Albert Tort 29. January 2015

Advance

The emergent discipline of using formal modelling and analysis to support industrial scale requirements engineering has matured in recent years [Woodcock et […]

Brett Bicknell, Karim Kanso 30. October 2014

Customized Agile RE Process

‘Classic upfront Requirements Engineering before the start of a project costs too much time and money!’ …nowadays, phrases like this reflect most customers’ […]

Ulf Ackermann, Dirk Fritsch 30. October 2014

Poor requirements?

Controlled outsourcing within system development requires a proper and well understood set of requirements at the start of a project. Subsequently this set of […]

Johan Zandhuis 30. October 2014

Readable requirements

At the Deutsche Telekom subsidiary T-Systems, Word templates have been created for entering requirements using the “Information Mapping®” method. The templates […]

Frank Rabeler 30. October 2014

TORE

When engineering requirements, many requirements professionals are challenged not only by the question of how to elicit or specify requirements, but […]

Dr. Sebastian Adam, Norman Riegel, Dr. Joerg Doerr 30. October 2014

Translating Exam Questions

Many Dutch students struggle with the IREB CPRE FL exam, which, in the Netherlands and Begium, was available in English only. They commented that the exam does […]

Hans van Loenhoud 30. October 2014

Automated Quality Assurance

There are many ways to check the content of the software requirements manually – inspections, reviews, walkthroughs, etc. However the attempt to automate the […]

Harry Sneed 30. July 2014

Open Up

Requirements Management and Requirements Engineering are fairly well established. In Germany, the Automotive industry has been on the forefront of innovation […]

Michael Jastram 30. July 2014

Product Management

This article provides an overview on product management and our experiences with introducing, improving and deploying the role of a product manager in […]

Christof Ebert 30. July 2014

Project Value Delivered

The quest to measure the quality of requirements through requirements metrics has been around almost as long as requirements themselves. Researchers have found […]

Joy Beatty, Candase Hokanson 30. July 2014

How agile can Requirements Engineers really be?

Agile remains a disputed approach. Despite the bold sounding claims of many articles on its proven ability to increase productivity and reduce costs, some […]

Gareth Rogers 30. July 2014

Rigorous Verification

ADVANCE is a European-wide initiative between industry and academia to lead the future development of high-quality embedded systems in a more cost-effective […]

Brett Bicknell, Karim Kanso, Daniel McLeod 30. July 2014

A key technique

This article is the second in a series of articles on requirements engineering published by Crescendo Technologies, following "This is not a requirement (of […]

Joseph Aracic 30. April 2014

Building the bridge

By the Editor – IREB GmbH: The Requirements Engineering Magazine aims at providing you with a profound insight into the practice of professional RE as well as […]

IREB 30. April 2014

Opportunities & Approaches

Motivation for Requirement Re-Use: When you compare the re-use of requirements with the re-use of designs you may get the impression that re-use of […]

Jens Schirpenbach 30. April 2014

Product Owner in Scrum

Scrum is today the most discussed method of agile software engineering. The connection between requirements engineering and agile methods itself is a widely […]

Alexander Rachmann, Jesko Schneider, Frank Engel 30. April 2014

Toward Better RE

Caveat: I do not pretend to have all of the answers – I only wish to share what I’ve learned. RE Magazine has graciously provided an opportunity for me to […]

Dr. Ralph R. Young 30. April 2014

Gender Studies

Are there many women Requirements Engineers? It is almost impossible to get reliable numbers on that question. Studies like [CAN12] don’t give any statistics, […]

Maria-Therese Teichmann, Eva Gebetsroither, Corinna Unterfurtner, Alexandra Kreuzeder 30. April 2014

Five Questions

I was recently speaking to a large group of BAs about some of the lessons learned picked up over my years in the profession. I had a fairly large sample – a […]

Howard Podeswa 30. January 2014

Innovation Arena

Prioritization of requirements is an essential activity. Most important requirements shall be developed first, optimizing the return on investment. The weak […]

Rainer Grau 30. January 2014

RE for Testers

Testers use requirements as the basis of test cases, review them for testability, and often participate in general requirement reviews or inspections. […]

Erik van Veenendaal 30. January 2014

Think Like a Scientist

All organizations strive to meet their envisioned goals and strategic objectives, creating greater business value for their stakeholders. While not all […]

Mats Wessberg 30. January 2014

What does it mean?

Developing a software system is a challenging task for all participants including stakeholders, requirements engineers, project managers, architects, […]

Kim Lauenroth 30. January 2014

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