CSC 480
Homework 2: Requirements analysis

Due Feb. 14

You are to turn in a Software Requirements Specification for your project. Exactly what that means will depend on the project, but at minimum it should include

• One-sentence "vision statement": what is the product for?

• Brief (e.g. one paragraph) description of what product is supposed to do

• Client (if any): why does this person/organization want the product written?

• Intended users: what kind of people, what background, what's their motivation for using the product?

• Other stakeholders: anybody else who might be affected (for better, for worse, or just for different) by the product's existence

• Business requirements: a list of desired capabilities and properties, in a language the client or user would understand.
  Try to assign priorities (at least "high", "medium", "low", if not more detailed) to these.

  It may be helpful to divide them into

  • functional requirements: functions the program should be able to perform (again, from a user's or client's perspective)
  • non-functional requirements: constraints such as privacy, security, fault-tolerance, response time, etc. An example of a security constraint might be "only an authenticated administrator is allowed to modify such-and-such table".

• Technical requirements: desired capabilities and properties, in computer science terms.
  Use-case diagrams, screen mockups, user-interface state transition diagrams, etc. may all be appropriate here, but avoid being too prescriptive yet about how these requirements are to be met. Make clear which technical requirements correspond with which business requirements (e.g. "this satisfies business requirement 3a").

  As before, assign priorities, and as before, it may be useful to divide them into functional and non-functional requirements.