Systems Requirements Engineering Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 1500 words

Systems Requirements Engineering - Essay Example It is the phase that encompasses those tasks that go into determining the needs to meet the goals, taking account of the possible conflicts and specifying the overall risks. A sub-phase of the requirements specifications which deems high importance is Software Requirements Specification (SRS). SRS is a description of a behavioral aspects of the system which includes all the interactions that the users will have with the product (Stellman & Greene, 2005). Modeling is a central part of all activities that lead up to the deployment of a good software (Booch et al, 2005). Modeling is exactly the role that Unified Modeling Language plays in requirements specifications. The role of Unified Modeling Language is to model interactive systems, whose behaviors emerge from the interaction of their components with each other and with the environment (Goldin et al., 2001). In traditional computation, algorithmic models were sufficient for description of requirements. However, todays interactive systems which are capable of self reconfiguring and adapting to their environment, algorithm tools do not suffice. Unlike traditional procedural languages, UML provides support for the inherently open-ended preliminary steps of systems analysis and specification, which are becoming increasingly complex (Wegner, 1997). UML is used to visualize, specify, construct and document the artifacts of the software-intensive system. A software of any nature or propor tion will have multiple methods, functions, interface and external and internal accesses. To support such a broad mix of entities, UML provides different views to analyze this software. Analysis of each of this views gives the software designer a set of requirements which can be consequently forward engineered. The prominent views provided by UML are Use Case View, Component View, Deployment View, Concurrency View and Logical View (Eriksson & Penker, 1998). Use Case View: Requirements capture has two objectives: to find the true requirements and to represent them n a suitable way for the users, customers and developers (Jacobson et al., 1999). True requirements are the end user functionalities desired by the user of the system. These functionalities must be presented in a way such that users spend minimum amount of time understanding it. Use Cases can be applied to capture the intended behavior of the system being developed, without having to specify how that behavior is implemented (Booch et al., 2005). UML provides Use Case diagrams to model the Use Case View. Logical View: The purpose of logical view is to specify the functional requirements of the system. This means that the logical view shows both the static and dynamic views of the system. The logical view concentrates on getting the best logical grouping of functionality into objects (fincher, 2007). The main artifact of logical view is the design model which gives a concrete description of the functional behavior of the system. UML provides Class diagrams and Object diagrams to model