Software Engineering

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CHAPTER 7 
Understanding Software Requirements
implementation. In addition, it provides the software integration strategy, which 
depicts how the structural units and components should be assembled, integrated, 
and tested until an integrated software product configuration is realized.
Stakeholder needs and expectations must be accumulated, deconflicted, harmo-
nized, and prioritized. The resulting set of needs must be pruned to balance the work 
forecasted necessary to satisfy the needs with the scope of resources available to the 
software development project. Once the software requirements are agreed upon, the set 
of software specifications should be baselined and placed under configuration control.
The software requirements provide the basis for refining and elaborating the 
technical work plans. The SWE-IPT utilizes software engineering principles and 
practices to conceive the technical plans for the software development project. 
Technical planning begins with the identification of tasks, task dependencies,  
and interrelationships to identify workflows and the requisite results of each task 
and workflow. The roles of each of the technical organizations must be identified and 
the resource requirements determined. These task definitions and resource require-
ments are coalesced into work packages and aligned within the project timeline. 
Task-based work packages are combined into larger elements of work (activities) 
and organized into the technical work breakdown structure (WBS). The WBS is 
completed by adding the project management and other nontechnical work pack-
ages to represent the total work to be performed and the respective budget and 
schedule information. The WBS provides the details necessary to prepare techni-
cal and project plans, such as the software engineering plan, integrated master plan 
(IMP), integrated master schedule (IMS), and project plan.
Establishing software requirements specifications and technical and project plans 
requires a rigorous, disciplined approach that involves trade-off analysis (technical), 
cost-benefit analysis (management), and risk assessments to ensure that the require-
ment specifications are complete and can be achieved by the resulting plans, sched-
ules, and resource budgets. The identification and determination of the scope of each 
task must reflect the effort to define, design, and implement the software functionality 
and features specified by the software requirements. 
Figure 7.1
 depicts how the soft-
ware requirements are established and reflected in technical and project plans. The 
following sections describe each step of this workflow that translates stakeholder 
needs into requirement specifications and realistic technical and project plans.