Requirements Engineering

What Does Requirements Engineering Mean?

Requirements engineering is the process of conforming engineering designs to a set of core software requirements. This is critically important for creating accurate results in software engineering.

Techopedia Explains Requirements Engineering

In requirements engineering, engineers look at a set of data pertaining to the goals and objectives of the software: how it will work and what are the qualities of the properties it must have to provide the results needed. Engineers then work forward from these data to look at specific coding solutions that support these results. Elements of requirements engineering include:

Requirements solicitation, where a software company gets the requirements from a client
Requirements analysis
Requirements specification
Requirements verification, where engineers confirm that the requirements are accurate
Requirements management, which matches processes to their requirements

It is important to point out that a major part of requirements engineering has to do with the stakeholders or parties involved in the process. Typically, developers from a software company tailor the software requirements according to the needs of the client. That means that many stages of requirements engineering happen during the communications between the client and the software company.

IT experts have pointed out how requirements engineering remains a significant challenge for companies, partly because of the ambiguous nature of software development, the challenge of getting accurate requirements from a client, and the ongoing process of matching internal processes at a development company to the goals and objectives of an outside client. In other words, requirements engineering attempts to bridge that divide between what the client and what the developers are thinking, and to create a solid, consistent framework for the actual construction of sophisticated software products.