January 2011 Edition
Computer Science Department, University of Cape Town
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The first two activities in the generic process framework is that of communication and modelling. A large portion of these activities are concerned with discovering the requirements of the software which the customer is asking to have developed. This chapter deals with this process of requirements engineering.
As with all other activities in a process model, requirements engineering should be tailored to fit the developers creating the software, the product being created, and the overall process model being employed. In the previous chapter you could already see this happening with the extreme programming software process model, which limits modelling to the creation of CRC cards (see Chapter 5, Object-oriented Analysis and Design).
Requirements engineering is concerned with understanding the software system that the customer has requested. It provides the base on which software design and programming can proceed. Importantly, if the developers do not adequately understand the requirements, it is very likely that the software will not meet the customer's needs. This makes understanding the customer's requirements important to the success of the development project.