Software Requirement

Software Requirement

[Name of Student]

Software Requirement

Introduction

The paper strives to present an essay on software requirement by presenting the summary of a research paper by Klaus Pohl (1993). The summary also identifies the purpose, motivation and framework for the research. Additionally, the paper aims to make a clear distinction between the three dimensions of Requirements Engineering(RE) and discusses the major goals that needs to be achieved within each of the three dimensions during the RE process.

Discussion

Klaus Pohl (1993, pp. n.d) in his research paper introduced the framework for requirements engineering (RE). The first part of the paper discusses the essence of the RE process. According to Pohl, the field of RE is considered as of growing importance with increasing efforts for research in this field. The main purpose of the research paper was to identify the the major goals that needs to be achieved within each of the three dimensions during the RE process in order to create a framework for RE. The developed framework for RE will help the researchers and engineers in collectively understanding the RE process. To develop the framework, the research paper looked into prior researches concerning the detection of requirements, which involves the issues capture, elicitation, verification and validation of requirements (Fickas, 1987, pp. 58-67). Therefore, for representing requirements some knowledge representation languages and formal specification languages were suggested. However, there application to RE processes was not simple. Further research, in the area of RE process, identified that this process must be understandable and traceable (Flynn & Dorfmann, 1990, pp.423-438). Therefore, the essence of RE process, conceptually, is to convert an input into the desired output. Therefore, the paper asserts that a specification of the system must exist at the closing stages of the RE process, having a complete specification of the system. However, the language of specification system must need to be decided in order to make the system equally understandable for different people. The paper asserts that designing this system in natural language may lead towards different implementations and designs, of the system, according to the understanding of different people. Therefore, a formal language is suggested to avoid different interpretations of the system.

Therefore, this description of the essence of RE process lead towards the identification of three major goals of the RE process, which are:

To enhance the conception of dense system into a comprehensive specification

To convert informal knowledge into formal knowledge

To achieve a collective agreement on the specification system of RE out of the personal views of different people.

These three goals helped in gaining knowledge about the three dimensions of RE process, which are: specification dimension, representation dimension and agreement dimension. The classification of initial output and desired output can be easily performed within these three dimensions of the RE process.

The specification dimension, of RE process, is associated with the understanding of requirements at a specified time. The specification of the system, at the start of the RE process, is relatively dense. The purpose of RE process, at the time of this ...