What is requirement engineering?

What does software requirements engineering mean? While it is a crucial phase in software engineering, we often tend to misunderstand it. Software requirements engineering is the first phase before any of the actual designing, coding, testing, or maintenance takes place.

To start with the software design, we create an initial requirement specification document called software requirements specificationThis is the description of a software system to be developed. , or SRS. A typical SRS usually contains key features, functional and non-functional requirements, use cases, UML diagrams, and sometimes a preliminary design. The client will have a clear understanding with the help of the diagrams to make sure the software will serve the intended purpose.

What is requirement engineering?

Requirement engineering is the early part of software engineering. In software engineering, we start eliciting the stakeholders’ requirements and move on to software design. Then we implement, code, test, integrate, and eventually deploy and maintain. This takes more effort because people usually don’t take requirement engineering seriously. Having this document at an early stage saves time and cost, as when it reaches the end and the requirements don’t match those of the stakeholders, it becomes challenging to make changes.