Reference no: EM132340229

Question

There's an entire engineering discipline called Requirements Engineering that focuses explicitly on the gathering, specification, and management of (typically software) requirements. If you're not very familiar with this field, you might want do some quick web searches, as there is a lot of interesting commentary and research about this topic.

Why is it so hard to get requirements right? What are some implications of getting them wrong? How can requirements be ambiguous or contradictory? Do requirements sometime change part-way through a project? Is that really so bad? (After all, we can always change the code, too!) Why are there so many satire/parody pieces and comical illustrations about requirements out there? Which do you think is more difficult: gathering requirements; writing requirements clearly for a developer; understanding requirements as a developer; or managing the inevitable changes to the requirements?