The first use of the term 'requirements engineering' was probably in 1979 in a TRW technical report[4] but did not come into general use until the 1990s with the publication of an IEEE Computer Society tutorial[5] and the establishment of a conference series on requirements engineering.
In the waterfall model,[6] requirements engineering is presented as the first phase of the development process. Later software development methods, including the Rational Unified Process (RUP), extreme programming (XP) and Scrum assume that requirements engineering continues through the lifetime of a system.
Alan M. Davis maintains an extensive bibliography of requirements engineering.[7]
The activities involved in requirements engineering vary widely, depending on the type of system being developed and the specific practices of the organization(s) involved.[8] These may include:
The Requirements Quality Analyzer tool (RQA) allows you to define, measure, improve and manage the quality of the requirements specifications within the systems engineering process
Some recent research suggests that software requirements are often an illusion misrepresenting design decisions as requirements in situations where no real requirements are evident.[9]
^Ralph, P. (September 2013). "The illusion of requirements in software development". Requirements Engineering18 (3): 293–296. doi:10.1007/s00766-012-0161-4.edit
