Understanding Requirements - Requirements Engineering and Management for Software Development Projects - page 22

10. Management of software development team—These individuals include
project manager, project leader and other senior management personnel
including program managers. These individuals would be in a position to have
a bird's eye view of the overall project and would be able to provide interface
requirements to ensure that the software product would be able to interface
effectively with other applications in the organization. They would also be
able to ensure that all functionality is included for the proposed software
product.
11. Marketing department—Especially in product development organizations,
marketing is a source of product requirements/specifications. A Marketing
department can generate product requirements from the field staff or a market
survey of the potential users of the proposed product. Market surveys are a
very popular vehicle to collect user requirements and freeze product specifi-
cations. A Marketing department is the primary source for one-upmanship
functionality in a COTS product.
2.5 Levels of Requirements
Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) has specified two levels of
requirements specifications, namely, the User Requirements Specification and
Software Requirements Specification. This gives rise to the question ''Do we have
two levels of requirements in software development?''
In any product there are two sets of requirements. One is the set of needs that
the product fulfills and the second is the set of specifications that the product must
adhere to in order for it to fulfill the needs of users. Let us take a bridge over a river
(or a body of water) as an example. The need to be fulfilled is a bridge that can
carry six lanes of traffic over a river of two furlongs breadth. Now based on this
specification, some preliminary work is carried out to determine the depth of the
water body, the banking on both the sides, the soil quality at the bottom of the
water, the number of cars, trucks and other vehicles that traverse the bridge etc.
Based on the study, the specifications for the bridge are finalized. These are the
product specifications for the bridge, which include the load it has to support, the
type of bridge (suspension, column supported, arched etc.), the width and so on.
Based on these product specifications, a bridge is designed. Using the design, the
bridge is constructed.
Similarly, in software development, the first expression of the need is the
requirement of software to fulfill the requirements of a business process. Taking this
first into account, a preliminary study is conducted to ascertain the needs of the
business processes. From these results the product specifications would be drawn up.
In the manufacturing industry, the aspect of drawing up product specifications
is referred to as Conceptual Design (or the High Level Design) and the working
out the details is referred to as the Detail Design (or the Low Level Design).