Software requirements specification

A software requirements specification (SRS) is a description of a software system to be developed. It is modeled after business requirements specification (CONOPS), also known as a stakeholder requirements specification (StRS). The software requirements specification lays out functional and non-functional requirements, and it may include a set of use cases that describe user interactions that the software must provide.

Software requirements specification establishes the basis for an agreement between customers and contractors or suppliers on how the software product should function (in a market-driven project, these roles may be played by the marketing and development divisions). Software requirements specification is a rigorous assessment of requirements before the more specific system design stages, and its goal is to reduce later redesign. It should also provide a realistic basis for estimating product costs, risks, and schedules.[1] Used appropriately, software requirements specifications can help prevent software project failure.[2]

The software requirements specification document lists sufficient and necessary requirements for the project development.[3] To derive the requirements, the developer needs to have clear and thorough understanding of the products under development. This is achieved through detailed and continuous communications with the project team and customer throughout the software development process.

The SRS may be one of a contract deliverable Data Item Descriptions[4] or have other forms of organizationally-mandated content.

Structure

An example organization of an SRS is as follows:[5]

Goals

The Software Requirements Specification (SRS) is a communication tool between stakeholders and software designers. The specific goals of the SRS are:

  • Facilitating reviews
  • Describing the scope of work
  • Providing a reference to software designers (i.e. navigation aids, document structure)
  • Providing a framework for testing primary and secondary use cases
  • Including features to customer requirements
  • Providing a platform for ongoing refinement (via incomplete specs or questions)

Requirements smell

Following the idea of code smells, the notion of requirements smell has been proposed to describe issues in requirements specification where the requirement is not necessarily wrong but could be problematic. In particular, the requirements smell :[6]

  • is an indicator for a quality problem of a requirements artifact.
  • does not necessarily lead to a defect and, thus, has to be judged by the context.
  • has a concrete location in the requirements artifact itself, e.g. a word or a sequence.
  • has a concrete detection mechanism (which can be automatic or manual and more or less accurate).

Examples of requirements smells are Subjective Language, Ambiguous Adverbs and Adjectives, Superlatives and Negative Statements.[6] Several of these smells can also be automatically detected with tools like Requirements Scout.

See also

References

  1. ↑ Bourque, P.; Fairley, R.E. (2014). "Guide to the Software Engineering Body of Knowledge (SWEBOK)". IEEE Computer Society. Retrieved 17 July 2014.
  2. ↑ "Software requirements specification helps to protect IT projects from failure". Retrieved 19 December 2016.
  3. ↑ Pressman, Roger (2010). Software Engineering: A Practitioner's Approach. Boston: McGraw Hill. p. 123. ISBN 9780073375977.
  4. ↑ "DI-IPSC-81433A, DATA ITEM DESCRIPTION SOFTWARE REQUIREMENTS SPECIFICATION (SRS)". everyspec.com. 1999-12-15. Retrieved 2013-04-04.
  5. ↑ Stellman, Andrew & Greene, Jennifer (2005). Applied software project management. O'Reilly Media, Inc. p. 308. ISBN 0596009488.
  6. 1 2 Femmer, Henning; Méndez Fernández, Daniel; Wagner, Stefan; Eder, Sebastian (2017). "Rapid quality assurance with Requirements Smells". Journal of Systems and Software. 123: 190–213. doi:10.1016/j.jss.2016.02.047.
  • 830-1984 — IEEE Guide to Software Requirements Specifications. 1984. doi:10.1109/IEEESTD.1984.119205. ISBN 0-7381-4418-5.
  • 830-1993 — IEEE Recommended Practice for Software Requirements Specifications. 1994. doi:10.1109/IEEESTD.1994.121431. ISBN 0-7381-4723-0.
  • 830-1998 — IEEE Recommended Practice for Software Requirements Specifications. 1998. doi:10.1109/IEEESTD.1998.88286. ISBN 0-7381-0332-2.
  • 29148-2011 - Systems and software engineering — Life cycle processes — Requirements engineering. 2011. pp. 1–94. doi:10.1109/IEEESTD.2011.6146379. ISBN 978-0-7381-6591-2. ("This standard replaces IEEE 830-1998, IEEE 1233-1998, IEEE 1362-1998 - http://standards.ieee.org/findstds/standard/29148-2011.html")
  • Leffingwell, Dean; Widrig, Don (2003). Managing Software Requirements: A Use Case Approach (2nd ed.). Addison-Wesley. ISBN 032112247X.
  • Gottesdiener, Ellen (2009). The Software Requirements Memory Jogger: A Desktop Guide to Help Business and Technical Teams Develop and Manage Requirements. Addison-Wesley. ISBN 157681114X.
  • Wiegers, Karl; Beatty, Joy (2013). Software Requirements, Third Edition. Microsoft Press. ISBN 9780735679665.
  • "IEEE SRS Template - rick4470/IEEE-SRS-Tempate". Retrieved 27 Dec 2017.
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