Links
http://askmagazine.nasa.gov/issues/14/14s_enough_barrowman.php - An interesting article in Volume 14, "ASK" magazine from the NASA APPL Academy Sharing Knowledge program by Jim Barrowman regarding the importance of requirements and having a clear, agreed to scope.
INCOSE Requirements Working Group Website. Information on the activities of the RWG, access to papers on requirements, and links to other related sites. Though the INCOSE website you have access to many other system engineering activities and also to a tools database.
Back issues of INSIGHT are available on the web courtesy of the Hampton Roads Area Chapter of INCOSE. Of particular interest are the theme sections of the past three years, which cover topics such as metrics, requirements management, process development and improvement, systems engineering, and the internet, and much more.
The Requirements Engineering Journal is aimed at those developing software, but is certainly not without application to non-software development. The scope of the Requirements Engineering Journal is to provide a focus for disseminating new results about the elicitation, representation and validation of requirements of software-intensive information systems or applications.
Requirements Engineering Specialist Group (RESG) of the British Computer Society. The RESG aims to provide a forum for interaction and within and between the many disciplines involved. To this end, the RESG website provides a resource for practitioners, researchers, and students interested in RE, including a calendar of events organized by the group, a quarterly newsletter (RQ), and a collection of related links to websites of interest.
Karl Wiegers, Process Impact has written a number of requirement books that we find very useful. Karl is author of many other books related to software development and has the most complete and succint book that we have read on the subject.
The Software Requirements Engineering (SRE) reflector provides dialogue between people interested in requirements engineering. Academics, business, and government participate. This reflector is monitored so that it does not get bogged down and full of trash. It is also recorded and you can get the full set of exchanges on a subject at a later time.
Home page of Ian Alexander, an independent consultant specializing in requirements engineering. His website introduces the main concepts of requirements engineering, describes his work, and provides an archive of his publications and book reviews (including a great review of our book, Customer-Centered Products.) There are also links to other sites including professional groups, mailing lists, tool vendors, and useful sources. We especially recommend Ian's book, Scenarios, Stories, Use Cases: Through the Systems Development Life-Cycle.
Requirements Engineering by Merlin Dorfman. First published in 1997, this article provides a high-level, tutorial-like presentation of the field of requirement engineering. The article reviews the progress made in requirement engineering over the past decade and characterizes different development methodologies as they pertain to requirements.
Newsletter of the Software Engineering Institute. Contains many articles on requirements engineering. Here is an excellent example article: Software Requirements Engineering.
Quality Plus Technologies, Inc. (QPTI), using Function Point Analysis, measures the size of software requirements, similar to how square feet measure the size of a floor plan (which is a building's functional requirements).This gives you much better estimates of the costs of your requirements.Carol Dekkers, President of QPTI, wrote this great review of our book, Customer Centered Products.
The following links take you to various references that discuss the definition of the terms "shall", "should", and "may":
2000 IEEE Standards Style Manual - Section 5 – The IEEE style manual for preparing IEEE Standards
ISO-TC 176-SC 2 – ISO Technical Committee 176 – Subcommittee 2 Home Page; Guide to the Terminology used in ISO 9001:2000 and ISO 9004:2000 (MSWord document)
Acquisition Policy vs. Acquisition Guidance – FAA Acquisition Management System
rfc2119 - Key words for use in RFCs to Indicate Requirement Lev – Harvard University memo concerning keywords to use in indicating requirement levels
Document 5.1 - Glossary of ES&H Terms – Environment, Safety, and Health Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory Glossary