This article contains close paraphrasing of non-free copyrighted sources. (September 2020) |
Requirements engineering (RE)[1] is the process of defining, documenting, and maintaining requirements[2] in the engineering design process. It is a common role in systems engineering and software engineering.
The first use of the term requirements engineering was probably in 1964 in the conference paper "Maintenance, Maintainability, and System Requirements Engineering",[3] but it did not come into general use until the late 1990s with the publication of an IEEE Computer Society tutorial[4] in March 1997 and the establishment of a conference series on requirements engineering that has evolved into the International Requirements Engineering Conference.
In the waterfall model,[5] requirements engineering is presented as the first phase of the development process. Later development methods, including the Rational Unified Process (RUP) for software, assume that requirements engineering continues through a system's lifetime.
Requirements management, which is a sub-function of Systems Engineering practices, is also indexed in the International Council on Systems Engineering (INCOSE) manuals.