Requirements Engineering Masterclass: Traditional & AI Apps

Define what a system must do by capturing user needs and essential functionalities, distinguishing what is needed from how it is built, and ensuring requirements are correct and complete.

Formalize and document requirements to align all stakeholders, define system scope, and guide planning, reducing scope creep and costly rework.

Identify the three main types of requirements—functional, non-functional (quality attributes), and constraints—and illustrate with examples like user authentication, performance, and GDPR constraints.

Explore how requirements engineering identifies, captures, and manages stakeholder needs through development and management, including elicitation, analysis, specification, validation, tracing, and change management.

Master requirements elicitation by extracting needs from users and stakeholders through techniques such as brainstorming, interviews, surveys, and workshops. Analyze needs, discuss feasibility, negotiate constraints, and reach clear agreements.

Facilitate brainstorming sessions to gather requirements from stakeholders, generate diverse ideas, and align features with business goals for new or enhanced products; document outcomes and prevent scope creep.

Conduct interviews with doctors, nurses, and administrative staff to uncover needs, pain points, and priorities for a healthcare app, using prepared questions, active listening, and thorough documentation.

Surveys and questionnaires gather requirements from a wide stakeholder base when in-person interviews aren’t feasible, offering brief, targeted questions and open, closed formats.

Observe and participate in the target environment to gain insights into inventory management, order processing, and shipment tracking, while documenting observations and mitigating observer biases.

Study similar systems to strengthen requirements gathering, elicitation, and modeling techniques by benchmarking Jira, Trello, and Asana, identifying strengths, weaknesses, functionality, UI, and integration opportunities.

Analyze unintended uses to uncover new requirements for a food delivery app, such as price comparison, reviews improvements, hours and locations features, and potential table reservations.

Plan workshops as predefined agenda-driven sessions with structure, led by a skilled moderator, for ERP projects, uniting finance, HR, supply chain, and IT to reveal requirements and align goals.

Highlight challenges in requirements gathering, including unclear and changing requirements, and undefined success criteria. Prototypes clarify needs and examples like drag-and-drop and data visualization align customer goals with real capabilities.

Ask open-ended questions to clarify requirements. Leverage workshops to surface needs, prioritize changes, estimate impact, and break projects into pieces with clear success criteria; validate understanding with stakeholders.

Master requirements gathering by using open-ended questions, workshops, and root-cause analysis, then prioritize changes, estimate impact, and define success criteria with a work breakdown structure.

Perform requirements analysis on gathered stakeholder needs to produce clear, feasible specifications guiding design and development, then define scope and apply Moscow and value-versus-effort analysis to resolve conflicts.

Apply requirements quality criteria—clear, agreed by stakeholders, unambiguous, necessary, consistent, feasible, verifiable, complete, and traceable—by documenting approvals, precise specifications, and testable metrics.

Learn how to document requirements with a clear software requirements specification (SRS), covering introduction, scope, objectives, constraints, functional and nonfunctional requirements, environment, interfaces, and use cases.

Validate documented requirements to ensure they reflect stakeholders' needs, then verify they are complete, consistent, and achievable through expert reviews, walkthroughs, modeling, and prototyping.

Modeling translates customer needs into detailed specifications, using use case, design, deployment, data flow and activity diagrams to visualize current and target system behavior, identify inefficiencies, and guide implementation.

Define the problem accurately by articulating stakeholder needs and root causes, using UML modeling with use case diagrams, class diagrams, and sequence diagrams to align on requirements.

Explore the main modeling notations, natural language, semi-formal UML, and formal z-notation, and their advantages and limitations. Learn how to choose the right notation to communicate requirements clearly.

Explore requirements modeling techniques, including use cases, actors, system boundary, and relationships; analyze user stories, UML diagrams, and UI mockups, with prioritization via Moscow method and value-versus effort analysis.

Master the requirements engineering process, from elicitation, analysis, specification, and validation to modeling and ongoing management, including tracing and change management throughout the project lifecycle.

Trace requirements to design, implementation, and testing artifacts using a traceability matrix, linking login, patient records, and appointments to design, code, and tests.

Practice requirements change management by identifying, evaluating, and implementing changes through change control and version control, prioritizing needs, and aligning stakeholders.

Compare traditional and AI-based requirements gathering, noting data-driven, probabilistic outcomes and evolving performance metrics. Explain how data needs, model accuracy, ethical considerations, and stakeholder roles shape AI requirements.

Learn how AI-based requirements differ from traditional software, addressing ambiguity, evolving goals, data quality, ethics, and integration through iterative elicitation and modeling.

Define a precise problem for an AI-based application and involve AI experts early to shape feasible requirements. Specify data needs, ethics, and evaluation metrics to guide continuous monitoring and improvement.

Discover certifications in requirements engineering, including IREB's professional pathway (foundation to expert), agile-focused certifications, and PMI's Certified Requirements Engineer, with a downloadable terminology guide.