What is it about?

This paper proposes a new way of categorizing requirements that facilitates eliciting only necessary requirements. In this way, it facilitates getting a set of requirements with the minimum amount to satisfy a given set of stakeholder needs.

Featured Image

Why is it important?

Requirements, both traditional ones and value functions, form the definition of an engineering problem. Therefore, the proper elicitation of requirements is key to achieve a satisficing solution. Eliciting too many requirements may however impose severe unnecessary constraints that jeopardize successful system development. Therefore, it is key to have methods that effectively facilitate the elicitation of sets of minimum requirements for a given set of stakeholder needs. This paper presents a method that provides improved performance with respect to existing ones.

Perspectives

One of the reasons categorizations of requirements are often used in industry is because of its perceived value for facilitating completeness in the requirement elicitation activity. While this may be effective for identifying stakeholders and their needs, it turns out to be an ineffective approach for eliciting system requirements. The proposed categorization on the contrary, while enabling elicitation of complete sets of requirements, facilitates avoiding eliciting unnecessary, inapplicable, and overlapping requirements. The proposed categorization is inspired by Max-Need's work on categorizing human needs.

Dr Alejandro Salado
Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University

Read the Original

This page is a summary of: A Categorization Model of Requirements Based on Max-Neef's Model of Human Needs, Systems Engineering, July 2013, Wiley,
DOI: 10.1002/sys.21274.
You can read the full text:

Read

Contributors

The following have contributed to this page