Modern Requirements Specification.
Donald G. Firesmith · The Journal of Object Technology · 2003
Requirements specification is the requirements engineering task during which analyzed requirements are properly documented for use by their intended audiences.Traditionally, this involved the requirements team using a word processing program to produce a single requirements specification document during an initial requirements phase of a project.However, trends in system development have made the numerous problems with this approach abundantly clear.Improvements in requirements tools have not only enabled better requirements management; they have also enabled the automatic generation of consistent, current, audience-specific requirements specifications that far better meet the needs of their individual audiences. TRADITIONAL REQUIREMENTS SPECIFICATIONDuring the 1970s and 1980s, requirements specification seemed at first glance to be a relatively simple task.During the initial requirements phase of a project, the requirements engineers would elicit functional requirements from the various stakeholders using a functional decomposition method such as structured analysis.Then they would use a simple word processing program to manually document these requirements in a single requirements specification document, which after a review and some minor iteration would be approved, placed under configuration control (for all practical purposes frozen), and published to its audiences.Everyone would base their work on the same requirements specification, and everyone could rest assured that the specification would not significantly change during the following design, coding, and testing phases.Thus, requirements specification was a manual task that had its place during the initial phase of the waterfall development cycle, and it was basically complete early in the project.Requirements specification was also a paper-document-based process with little if any real tool support.Unfortunately, many projects still use a similar approach to perform requirements specification. Challenges to AddressHowever, the previously described approach to the requirements specification task has numerous well-known problems.Being the result of a manual process, the single requirements specification document was time consuming and expensive to produce and