Requirements Engineering for Technical Products: Integrating Specification, Validation and Change Management

Abstract

Over the last few years the functionality and complexity of technical products has increased dramatically. This is reflected in the complexity of the development process. In this chapter we discuss in detail the resulting challenges that have to be faced by requirements engineering. We identified these challenges in interviews conducted at a German car manufacturer. The main part of this chapter presents the QUASAR requirements engineering process that faces all identified challenges. In particular, it supports: (1) a set of views and abstraction levels tailored to the stakeholders, (2) communication about these views through understandable notations, (3) efficient access based on tools and traces that make relationships between views explicit, (4) explicit feedback based on inspection and simulation, and (5) overall quality by integrating a formal specification technique with informal, textual specification techniques as well as through guidelines, checklists and tailored review techniques.