CS302: Software Engineering

Requirements elicitation requires the software engineer to interact with the stakeholder including customer users,to gather information about what the software system needs to do. In this unit, we examine the software engineer's activities to elicit, to analyze (or translate), to validate and to manage this phase of the life cycle in working with the customer to achieve a common understanding of the customer's goals. This set of activities is referred to as analysis and focuses on what the application will do, whereas design describes how the application will work. There are many ways to elicit and analyze customer requirements. As you learned, the three most commonly used methodologies are data-oriented, process-oriented, and object-oriented. In this unit, we will drive deeper and examine the conceptual foundations, activities, and deliverables underlying each of these methodologies applicable to software requirements and analysis.

As you review the material in this unit, spend some time on the object-oriented methodology as it applies to software requirements and analysis. You will be applying this in a later unit to put it all together in a case study.

Completing this unit should take you approximately 7 hours.