Requirements engineering (RE) is a human-centered activity and is fundamentally about communication. In some ways RE is straightforward: you need to work out who will be affected by a product, system or service; find out what they want it to do, and document it. You will need to manage their expectations about what can be achieved.
Once the solution is built, you need to check that it does what the people asked for. This sounds simple but is not necessarily easy.
RE is a cross-discipline activity and includes both soft skills and technical aspects. No two developments are the same; the scale, complexity, risk, novelty, and composition of the project team all vary between projects.
When developing new products, systems or services, there is much that is unknown and must be discovered. Because of these and many other factors, RE is not an exact science; it is not a completely systematic and repeatable “engineering process.”
Successful RE follows a reusable approach for efficiency but is not a copy-exact process. RE processes must be adapted or customized for the nuance of each individual development program.
This paper will discuss some of the issues that arise during RE and describe how the Easy Approach to Requirements Syntax (EARS) Syntax notation helps achieve desired outcomes and overcome many common development challenges by enabling you to improve your requirements engineering practices.
