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Effective requirements engineering

Published:24 October 2010Publication History
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Abstract

Failures in systems closely correlate to shortcomings in the system's requirements. Some historic data suggests that requirements are responsible for nearly half of all system development failures. This is especially true for critical systems that are real-time and embedded. Expectations for fault tolerance, graceful degradation, degraded performance modes, and temporal challenges (latency and synchronization) fail to be fully satisfied by common practice.

This tutorial discusses shortcomings in current practices, and provides guidance for enhanced practices that address historic shortcomings, and provide an approach to weighing tradeoffs associated with ambitious goals and realistic limits. It clarifies terminology to facilitate a clearer focus on underlying concepts. In addition, it specifically addresses the issue of stakeholder acceptability, allowing trade-offs of various system qualities to determine overall system acceptance. The tutorial does not describe in detail any specific techniques. Rather, it describes the ways that requirements need to be handled to maximize the likelihood of success.

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  1. Effective requirements engineering

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    • Published in

      cover image ACM SIGAda Ada Letters
      ACM SIGAda Ada Letters  Volume 30, Issue 3
      SIGAda 2010
      December 2010
      63 pages
      ISSN:1094-3641
      DOI:10.1145/1879097
      Issue’s Table of Contents
      • cover image ACM Conferences
        SIGAda '10: Proceedings of the ACM SIGAda annual international conference on SIGAda
        October 2010
        90 pages
        ISBN:9781450300278
        DOI:10.1145/1879063

      Copyright © 2010 Copyright is held by the author/owner(s)

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      Association for Computing Machinery

      New York, NY, United States

      Publication History

      • Published: 24 October 2010

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