Object Oriented
tedSystems Engineering Test and Evaluation (SETE) Conference, Canberra, October 2003
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Object-Oriented Requirements Engineering and Management
Joseph E. Kasser DSc, CEng, CM, MIEE Systems Engineering and Evaluation Centre University of South Australia (UniSA) Mawson Lakes South Australia, 5095 Joseph.kasser@unisa.edu.au Abstract Object-Oriented requirements engineering is an approach to encapsulating information about the process and product, as well as functionality into a requirements object. This paper identifies properties of a requirement object based on information in the process (development, management and test and development streams of work in the system life cycle (SLC) as well as information about the product needed. The paper also describes some of the functionality that could be added to the requirements object. The paper concludes that Object-Oriented requirements engineering and management can effect a significant reduction of the problems currently encountered in the SLC due to poor requirements engineering and management. Background The systems and software development industry is characterized by a paradigm of project failure (Standish 1995). The situation has been described by Cobb’s Paradox (Voyages 1996), which stated “We know why projects fail, we know how to prevent their failure --so why do they still fail?” One of the known contributing causes of these project failures is poor requirements engineering and management, which has been repeatedly and widely discussed and documented for at least 10 years (Hooks 1993; Kasser and Schermerhorn 1994; Jacobs 1999; Carson 2001; etc.). However, this continual documentation and discussion of the problem of poor requirements engineering and management has not resulted in a practical solution to the problem. This paper contains a preliminary introduction to an Object-Oriented approach to requirements engineering that might help to reduce the contribution of poor requirements engineering and
Page1
Object-Oriented Requirements Engineering and Management
Joseph E. Kasser DSc, CEng, CM, MIEE Systems Engineering and Evaluation Centre University of South Australia (UniSA) Mawson Lakes South Australia, 5095 Joseph.kasser@unisa.edu.au Abstract Object-Oriented requirements engineering is an approach to encapsulating information about the process and product, as well as functionality into a requirements object. This paper identifies properties of a requirement object based on information in the process (development, management and test and development streams of work in the system life cycle (SLC) as well as information about the product needed. The paper also describes some of the functionality that could be added to the requirements object. The paper concludes that Object-Oriented requirements engineering and management can effect a significant reduction of the problems currently encountered in the SLC due to poor requirements engineering and management. Background The systems and software development industry is characterized by a paradigm of project failure (Standish 1995). The situation has been described by Cobb’s Paradox (Voyages 1996), which stated “We know why projects fail, we know how to prevent their failure --so why do they still fail?” One of the known contributing causes of these project failures is poor requirements engineering and management, which has been repeatedly and widely discussed and documented for at least 10 years (Hooks 1993; Kasser and Schermerhorn 1994; Jacobs 1999; Carson 2001; etc.). However, this continual documentation and discussion of the problem of poor requirements engineering and management has not resulted in a practical solution to the problem. This paper contains a preliminary introduction to an Object-Oriented approach to requirements engineering that might help to reduce the contribution of poor requirements engineering and
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