COURSE INFORMATION


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Office Hours:
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Text:
Software Requirements, 3rd Edition Microsoft Press, by Karl E. Wiegers and Joy Beatty

Co-requisite:
ESOF 326, Software Maintenance, and
CSCI 332, Design and Analysis of Algorithms

Meeting times and place:
TBD, first 2 meetings on zoom, video required

What is in this course?

Requirements engineering and analysis is a critical stage of the software process as errors at this stage lead to problems in the design, implementation, deployment, and maintenance stages. Getting complete and consistent requirements is a complex process of negotiations with system stakeholders. As Software Engineer and author Tom DeMarco says:

"Analysis is frustrating, full of complex interpersonal relationships, indefinites, and difficult. In a word, it is fascinating. Once you're hooked, the old easy pleasures of system building are never again enough to satisfy you."

In this course you will have a chance to explore various requirements engineering processes, effective ways to "discover" requirements, requirements models, formats for expressing requirements, and validation and management techniques for requirements. A formal specification language will be studied. You will create a complete set of requirements for a small system, or a portion of a large system.

Grading:

Updated July 27, 2020
Activity Percentage
Reading preparation for weekly meetings
  • July 3
  • July 10
  • July 20
  • July 27
  • August 3 (No readings the final week so grade is based on the final submission of the SRS)
25%
Exercises
  • July 3
  • July 10
  • July 20
  • July 27
  • August 3 (No exercises the final week so grade is based on the final submission of the SRS)
25%
Project - Instructor grade
  • July 3
  • July 15
  • July 22
  • July 29
  • August 3
25%
Project - Client grade
  • July 3
  • July 10
  • July 17
  • July 24
  • August 3
25%

Class Organization:

This extrememly accelerated class (15 weeks condensed to 5 weeks) requires students to carefully read and digest the book material and apply it to a project. Each week we will meet to discuss the readings assigned. At that time, you will be graded on your comprehensions of the material. We will begin by giving you a chance to ask any questions that you have about the material. I will then ask questions from the text, in order to determine your understanding of the material and ability to apply the concepts to the class project, or another hypothetical project.

Exercises are associated with some chapters. Answers to these exercises are to be emailed to me by the end of the day in which the material is assigned. These will be graded, and sample answers discussed at the weekly meetings.

Dr. Phil Curtiss will be the client for the project. The project gives you a chance to apply the material from the text and the class discussions to a real-life project. Writing a Software Requirements and Specificaiton is a major activity of the course and half of your grade will come from the this project.

Catalog description of the course:

Concentrates on the development of requirements for software applications and systems. Topics include elicitation, analysis, documentation, and modeling software requirements. The Z specification language is one of the techniques used for modeling requirements. Co-requisite: ESOF 326 & CSCI 332. (2nd)

Expected skills students have coming into the course:

Expected outcomes from taking this course:

Related program outcomes: