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AI Assistants in Requirements Engineering | Part 1

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is playing an increasingly critical role in various industries, and Requirements Engineering (RE) is no exception. Large Language […]

The importance of active listening in the role of a Business Analyst

The International Institute of Business Analysis (IIBA) defines business analysis as “the practice of enabling change in the context of an enterprise by […]

Requirements Elicitation in Modern Product Discovery

If you are working on products, you have realized product management handles requirements in a different way. When a business analyst or a product owner is […]

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 […]

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 […]

Why Your Agile Organization Needs a High-Performing Requirements Engineering Competency

In this article, I’m going to answer a question that I’ve been asked from people with stakes in requirements engineering (RE) and its sister competency, […]

Classical requirements and test analysis a discontinued model?

In times of increasing "agilization", the question arises as to whether classic requirements engineering and test analysis are still relevant at all. Since the […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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) […]

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 […]

The Potential of User Tests for Requirements Engineering

The article covers a topic of software tests as a requirement source, as techniques to investigate requirements and confirm compliance of the final product […]

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 […]

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? […]

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 […]

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 […]

What is the Relevance of Requirements Engineering Research to Practitioners?

Introduction Requirements Engineering (RE) has been the subject of promising research for the last four decades, supported by a strong and vibrant research […]

Detecting Incoherent Requirements in Large Documents

The different protagonists involved in requirement production is a source of mismatches, inconsistencies, incoherence and redundancies. Indeed, stakeholders, […]

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 […]

Learning from history: The case of Software Requirements Engineering

This article describes initial conclusions of our research into how and why the requirements engineer’s role has changed over the years, with the longer-term […]

ReqInspector

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

Data Science – the expanding frontier for Business Analysts

Prelude As Business Analysts our profession is constantly evolving over time. As our roles mature, our experience, expertise, and skills gradually move us from […]

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 […]

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. […]

Challenges in the elicitation and determination of precise requirements from animal stakeholders

Dogs do speak, but only to those who know how to listen. Orhan Pamuk

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 […]

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 […]

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]. […]

What is a Useful Perspective in Considering Requirements Engineering Relative to Systems Engineering?

Many organizations take their product development seriously. Those that do usually also practice requirements engineering (RE), amongst a host of other […]

REQM guidance matrix

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

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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, […]

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 […]

Making “agiLE” Work

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

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 […]

KCycle: Knowledge-Based & Agile Software Quality Assurance

Agile paradigms and DevOps approaches have changed software engineering processes by focusing on iterativity, communication and collaboration between different […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

The Context-Canvas

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

How Requirements Engineering can benefit from crowds

Requirements are usually elicited, analyzed, and validated using techniques that are strongly based on the co-presence of the persons involved. These […]

Leveraging Creativity Techniques in Requirements Elicitation

In recent years, Creativity-based Approaches for Requirements Elicitation (CAREs) have appeared as one promising trend to tackle the requirements elicitation […]

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 […]

Modeling Requirements and Context as a means for Automated Requirements Validation

When designing an automation plant the control software for the entire plant is typically designed after the physical architecture of the automation plant and […]

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 […]

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 […]

Evolving and Improving the Requirements Approach to Big Data Projects

The Big Data technology and services market is expected to grow at a 26.4% compound annual growth to $41.5 billion in 2018 (source: IDC). Getting involved in a […]

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 […]

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 […]

Requirements Engineering in Research Projects: Food for Thought

This article addresses practitioners working in the specific setting of publicly funded, international research projects where multiple organizations and […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

A Finite State Machine Model for Requirements Engineering

Requirement models ‎are used to clarify and improve requirements consistency, unambiguity, correctness and completeness. The finite state machine (FSM) model […]

Applying IREB RE practices in an agile environment

Which of the many techniques learned by a certified requirements engineer according to the CPRE-FL syllabus are still helpful in agile projects? Which have to […]

Is requirements engineering still needed in agile development approaches?

When organizations come across agile approaches, they discover the following lines in the agile manifesto [1]: We have come to value: Individuals and […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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. […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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. […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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. […]

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 […]

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. […]

The Recover Approach

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

Advance

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

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’ […]

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 […]

Readable requirements

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

TORE

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

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 […]

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 […]

Open Up

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

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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, […]

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 […]

Innovation Arena

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

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. […]

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 […]

What does it mean?

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