Comparison of object oriented requirements engineering processes, with other requirements engineering processes: Wipro Technologies

Abstract

A central factor in how well software is developed and operates is how well the requirements are understood during the development process. A slight change to requirements can affect cost and schedule because their definition underlies all analysis, design and implementation. However, Requirements engineering remains one of the most difficult parts of the software engineering process. Over the years, many software development processes and methodologies have attempted to improve the software development process (and the requirements engineering process as well). Among these methodologies are the objectoriented methodologies. While the benefits of object-oriented methodologies is obvious to design and programming of software, this paper attempts to study what benefits they offer to the requirements engineering process. The current literature has been studied to see what are advantages and disadvantages object oriented requirements engineering offers as compared to other requirements engineering processes. A criteria for evaluating a good requirements engineering ^process have been developed. Next the a few actual software projects have been studied and the opinions of the software engineers in these projects have been sought to validate what has been suggested by literature. The findings have been that object oriented requirements engineering scores over other methodologies by incorporating Iterative development and prototyping more seamlessly into the overall software development process. The literature as well as the projects studied suggested that Iterative development and prototyping offer distinct benefits to requirements engineering. Besides object oriented software development makes it easier to accommodate changes and this is another reason to adopt an object-oriented process for software development (and requirements engineering)