What is evolutionary requirements analysis?

Requirements analysis is of many types depending up on which development process or methodology is being followed. This article has been written about a type of requirements analysis known as “evolutionary requirements analysis”. But, before going on to the main discussion we will first brief up ourselves with the concepts of a general requirements analysis.

WHAT IS REQUIREMENTS ANALYSIS?

- Requirements analysis is a means of encompassing the tasks that are used in the determination of the conditions and the needs of the new software system or application under development.

- Even the various requirements of the stake holders that conflict with each are taken in to account in the requirements analysis.

- The stake holders here can be either the users or the beneficiaries.

- Requirements analysis actually fall under the category of the requirements engineering but it is a common and frequent requirement of all the other branches of the engineering.

- It encompasses with the below mentioned activities:
1. Eliciting
2. Analyzing
3. Documenting
4. Validating
5. Management of the software system

- With a proper requirements analysis only a proper base version of the software system or application can be created which other wise would be an impossible job.

- For a requirement of the software system or application to be taken in to consideration under the requirements analysis it should possess the below mentioned characteristics:
1. It should have been documented.
2. It should be actionable and active.
3. It should be measurable.
4. It should be traceable by the testing methodologies
5. It can be related to the identified business opportunities, activities or needs.
6. It should have been sufficiently defined with details for the designing of the software system or application.

If we see concept wise, three major activities are involved in any requirements analysis which are:

1. Eliciting Requirements
This activity is involved with the identification of the various kinds of requirements that have been derived from several sources like:
(a) Business process documentation,
(b) Project documentation
(c) Project charter,
(d) Interviews of the stake holders,
(e) User stories and so on.
This step is often known as the “requirements gathering”.

2. Analyzing Requirements
This step is involved with the determination of the level of correctness of the stated requirements in the requirements list on the grounds of the following factors:
(a) Clarity
(b) Completeness
(c) Consistency
(d) Unambiguity
(e) Resolution of any apparent conflicts and so on.

3. Recording Requirements
This step is involved with the documentation of the requirements in various forms like:
(a) Summary list
(b) Natural language documents
(c) User stories
(d) Use cases
(e) Process specifications and so on.

EVOLUTIONARY REQUIREMENTS ANALYSIS

- Requirements analysis is quite a time consuming as well as an arduous process for which many types of psychological skills have to be exercised.

- With the new environment, changing of the requirements and the stake holders is obvious, and so it becomes extremely important to keep the requirements updated by identifying the needs of the stake holders.

- It should also be determined that up to what level did the stake holders understood the implications of the program.

- The evolutionary requirements analysis is often abbreviated to “ERA”.

- As the term itself states, the evolutionary computing techniques are used in the automatic selection of the machine and human agents in the model of the software system so as to match the requirements which are non functional.

- The aspects such as the performance, reliability and cost of many different software systems are analyzed via the execution of the model variants along with the scenarios.

- Out of all, the software systems which perform better are selected in order to obtain an optimal solution.