Daniel M. Berry
Cheriton School of Computer Science
University of Waterloo
Waterloo, ON, Canada
Abstract:
Anyone who has built or remodeled a house and has developed or enhanced SW
must have noticed the similarity of these activities.
This talk describes some lessons about requirements engineering I
learned while being a customer in a house building and two house
remodelings. The biggest problem is to avoid very expensive
requirements creep. The main lesson is the importance of the customer
insisting on following a full requirements engineering process,
including goal identification, requirements elicitation, analysis, and
specification, and validation of the specification. A secondary lesson
is that a customer has an important role in requirements engineering
and he or she sometimes needs to learn that role.