Requirements Engineering

Requirements engineering (RE) is the key to success or failure of every product, service or system development project, understanding the development results as the implementation of the specific set of requirements. A good requirements definition is thus the prerequisite for high-quality solutions and reduces the cost of change, both of prototypes and production tools, and ultimately the warranty costs. However, RE for system development is more and more challenged by two interrelated trends: the increasing complexity of systems and the responsibility of the provider for the whole system life cycle. Thus, from a systems engineering point of view, RE has to define requirements for a rising amount of tangible and intangible components from a growing number of different stakeholders. Ad-ditionally, RE has to take into account requirements from every stage of the sys-tem life cycle and feed the results back to the development process. Many organi-zations are still missing effective practices and a documented RE process to tackle the upcoming challenges in systems engineering. This chapter aims at giving an overview on the RE context and challenges for systems engineering and subse-quently describes the state-of-the-art for structuring and processing requirements. Furthermore, two case studies illustrate the current situation and methods for reso-lution in industry and show how the identified challenges can be met by IT sup-port. Finally, future trends and needs for RE research and its further integration with concurrent engineering and life cycle management approaches are outlined.