Requirements Engineer

Definition

Requirements Engineer
(a.k.a., Business Analyst, Business System Analyst, Requirements Analyst, and Systems Analyst)

the role that is played when a person performs requirements engineering tasks during an endeavor

Classification

As illustrated in the preceding figure, Requirements Engineer is part of the following inheritance hierarchy:

• Type: Concrete
• Superclass: Engineer
• Subclasses:
  • None

Responsibilities

The typical role-specific responsibilities of a Requirements Engineer are to:

• Engineer the requirements for an system.
• Engineer the requirements for an application.
• Engineer reusable requirements for an application domain.
• Engineer the requirements for a reusable component.

Requirements Engineer typically inherits the general role responsibilities from the Role method component.

Personal Profile

To fulfill these responsibilities, requirements engineers typically should have the following personal characteristics, expertise, training, and experience:

Personal Characteristics

• Able to think abstractly and work at high-levels of abstraction (i.e., able to work with requirements without being drawn into the details of design and implementation decisions).
• Able to successfully manage the multiple concurrent issues, ambiguities, and contradictions that typically occur during requirements engineering.
• Able to collaborate well with customer representatives, domain experts, managers, and architects.
• Flexible when confronted with evolving goals and requirements.

Expertise

• A deep and practical understanding of the theory, practice, and tools of requirements engineering.
• Deep knowledge and experience in requirements analysis techniques such as use case modeling and object modeling.
• Excellent verbal and written communications skills that can be used to clarify and effectively specify requirements.
• Basic knowledge of the customer’s overall business and the relevant application domain(s).

Training

• Academic courses, conference tutorials, or on-the-job training (OJT) in requirements engineering including both functional requirements (e.g., use case modeling) and non-functional requirements.
• A bachelor’s degree in systems engineering, software engineering, or the equivalent.

Experience

• Have significant (e.g., one year) actual experience on a requirements team successfully engineering requirements on similar endeavors.

Tasks

Requirements Engineers typically perform the following role-specific tasks in an iterative, incremental, parallel, and time-boxed manner:

• Requirements Engineering Tasks (of Business Requirements Engineering):
  • Customer Analysis
  • Stakeholder Profiling
  • Market Analysis
  • Competitor Analysis
  • User Analysis
  • Business Visioning
  • Requirements Reuse
• Requirements Engineering Tasks (of Application Requirements Engineering):
  • Application Visioning
  • Requirements Reuse
  • Requirements Identification
  • Requirements Analysis
  • Requirements Specification
• Quality Engineering Tasks:
  • Quality Control – Business Strategy Evaluation
  • Quality Control – Technology Strategy Evaluation
  • Quality Control – Digital Branding Evaluation
  • Quality Control – Environments Evaluation
  • Quality Control – Architecture Evaluation

Requirements Engineer typically inherits common role tasks from the role method component.

Teams

Requirements Engineers typically perform these tasks as members of the following teams:

• Business Strategy Team
• Requirements Team
• Evaluation Teams:
  • Strategy Evaluation Team
  • Architecture Evaluation Team
  • Environments Evaluation Team
  • Test Evaluation Team

Work Products

As members of these teams, Requirements Engineers typically produce all or part of the following work products:

• Business Engineering Requirements Work Products:
  • Actor Cards
  • Use Case Cards
  • Customer Stakeholder Profiles
  • Customer Analysis
  • Competitor Profiles
  • Market Analysis
  • User Profiles
  • User-Task Matrices
  • User Analysis
  • Business Vision Statement
  • Glossary
• Application Development Requirements Work Products:
  • Actor Cards
  • Use Case Cards
  • Application Vision Statement
  • Requirements Executive Summary
  • System Requirements Specification
  • External API Specification
  • Glossary
  • Domain Model Document
• Quality Work Products:
  • Inspection Report
  • Inspection Summary Report

Guidelines

The following guidelines have proven useful with regard to Requirements Engineers:

• Persons who play the requirements engineer role often come from a technical, managerial, or marketing background.
• However, requirements engineer is not a part-time role that a manager or a domain expert can lightly take on. Persons typically require explicit training in requirements engineering to be sucessful requirements engineers.
• This role typically inherits the common team guidelines from the roles method component.
• Although requirements engineers are also known in industry as business analysts, business systems analysts, requirements analysts, and systems analysts, we use the term ‘requirements engineer’ for the same reasons that we call the activity ‘requirements engineering’:
  • Requirements involve more than just analysis.
  • Requirements are critical to the success of an endeavor and consequently need to be engineered to have the necessary qualities.