Catalog Course Description:
Provides students with an opportunity to explore and experience methodologies, tools, and techniques for eliciting, analyzing, specifying, and managing requirements in modern software development organizations.  Focuses on the intersection of requirements engineering, strategic IS and business planning, and business process reengineering.  Addresses change management in a requirements engineering context.

Pre-requisites and Co-requisites:
MSSE student or
INFO 620 Information Systems Analysis and Design (Prerequisite or co-requisite)

Curriculum Role:
This course develops students skills in problem analysis and prepares them to analyze requirements for, and to specify, organizational information systems. The course is required for software engineering students and is recommended for students who are intending to pursue a career in information systems applications development or related areas.

Course Rationale:
This course introduces students to the essential skills of requirements analysis and information systems specification. The intent of the course is to develop critical thinking skills in systems requirements analysis, then to familiarize students with common software specification forms and techniques. It emphasizes the analysis of organizational and stakeholder requirements for change – defining the system problem – before introducing students to formal software requirements specification techniques to define the a systems solution.

Course Outcomes:
Upon successful completion of this course, a student will be able to:
• Investigate the complex problems and IS opportunities of real-world organizations, to analyze requirements for information systems change;
• Appreciate various methods by which business requirements for change may be converted into working, maintainable information systems;
• Use specialized techniques for information technology (IT) requirements elicitation, modeling and analysis, to produce a software requirements specification;
• Understand the process by which agreement is obtained on information system software requirements, and how requirements are managed and evaluated;
• Be aware of common and novel forms of software requirements analysis, how to select between them, and how to use them to communicate with developers and users.

Course Content:
Principal topics and the approximate number of weeks devoted to each are:
• Software development life-cycle models and introduction to requirements engineering (1)
• Defining the systems change problem: business analysis, problem investigation, and defining the scope of information systems change (3)
• System requirements elicitation methods: stakeholder analysis, scenarios, storyboards, prototypes,  business vs. system use-cases, defining system features (2)
• Producing formal specifications: specifying the software product, functional, non-functional, and supplementary requirements, evaluating the quality of requirements (2)
• Requirements management, assessing risks, change management (1)
• Automated environments and tools for requirements engineering (1)

Presentation:
Note: Presentation method may vary somewhat from section to section.
Presentation will include lectures, participatory exercises and examples, and discussion.

Assessment:
Note: Assessment method may vary somewhat from section to section.
Evaluation will be based on class exercises, participation in investigation and discussion of requirements elicitation techniques, and a term project.