5.5.2 The Effectiveness of Multiple Software Requirements Elicitation Methods — A Case Study

Abstract Requirements engineering methods have been developed to assist in requirements specification. Teaching these methods to college engineering students should prepare students to develop a more complete, consistent, and testable requirements specification than they would have developed if they had not used these methods. The “Software Metrics Toolset Software Requirements Specification” was developed using several requirements engineering methods and was completed in Fall 1997 EE590 Software Systems Engineering II class. This report will compare the final set of requirements from the Software Metrics Toolset (SMT) Software Requirements Specification to the developed SMT for completeness and cost impact. The software requirements elicitation methods used in the development of the Software Metric Toolset effectively limited the cost of requirement changes in the actual development and customer delivery stage to less than 3% of the budgeted cost. The results underscore the value of using multiple methodologies that look at different aspects of the requirements.