• Software Requirements – Styles and Techniques, by Soren Lausen, Addison Wesley, 2002, ISBN 0-201-74570-4 Articles
• Several journal articles will be given to the students to reinforce the material discussed in class

• Introduction and basic concepts
• The role of requirements
• Problems observed in practice
• Framing the problem

• Data models
• Entity relationship diagrams
• Data expressions

• Human/computer – who does what?
• Context diagrams
• Screens and prototypes
• Use cases and misuse cases
• Data flow diagrams

• Complex and simple functions
• Tables and decision tables
• State diagrams
• Activity diagrams
• Class diagrams
• Collaboration diagrams
• Sequence diagrams, events, and messages

• Quality factors
• The quality grid
• Open metric and open target
• Capacity and accuracy requirements
• Performance requirements
• Usability requirements
• Security requirements
• Maintenance requirements

• Survey of elicitation techniques
• Stakeholder analysis
• Interviewing
• Observation
• Task demonstration
• Document studies
• Questionnaires
• Brainstorming
• Focus groups
• Domain workshops
• Design workshops
• Prototyping
• Pilot experiments
• Study similar companies
• Negotiation
• Risk analysis
• Cost/benefit analysis
• Goal domain analysis
• Domain-requirements analysis

• Quality criteria for a specification
• Checking the specification in isolation
• Contents check
• Structure check
• Consistency check and CRUD
• Checks against surroundings
• Checklist forms

The course is intended for people who are becoming requirements engineers, for people working as requirements engineers and interested in learning new techniques, for people who want to develop a greater appreciation of the importance of requirements engineering, and for people who will be working closely with requirements engineers and need to understand how they do their jobs.

Rob Oshana is an adjunct professor at Southern Methodist University. He has designed and taught numerous courses in the School of Engineering and Applied Science. He also has over 23 years of industry software engineering experience managing multiple projects in the defense, commercial, and IT fields. He is a professional engineer, a Senior Member of IEEE and speaks regularly at industry conferences on a wide range of topics.

This course attempts to be self-contained. We will deal with some mathematical notation and formulas, but no math beyond elementary algebra will be used. Basic familiarity with computer systems is expected. Some programming experience will make some of the techniques we will discuss more meaningful.

The goal of this class is to provide you with techniques which can help you improve your requirements engineering process. By improving these processes, you will create descriptions of system requirements which are easier to understand and contain fewer errors and inconsistencies. You will also have more effective procedures for managing changes to these requirements and assessing the impact and cost of these changes