The Anatomy of Requirements
This work aims to clarify foundational concepts to spur advances in software requirements study and practice, but it is incremental as it builds on existing literature.
The paper addresses the lack of precise definitions for fundamental concepts in requirements engineering by providing clear definitions and two systematic taxonomies for requirement elements and their relations, evaluated on published documents.
Requirements engineering is crucial to software development but lacks a precise definition of its fundamental concepts. Even the basic definitions in the literature and in industry standards are often vague and verbose. To remedy this situation and provide a solid basis for discussions of requirements, this work provides precise definitions of the fundamental requirements concepts and two systematic classifications: a taxonomy of requirement elements (such as components, goals, constraints...) ; and a taxonomy of possible relations between these elements (such as "extends", "excepts", "belongs"...). The discussion evaluates the taxonomies on published requirements documents; readers can test the concepts in two online quizzes. The intended result of this work is to spur new advances in the study and practice of software requirements by clarifying the fundamental concepts.