Software Requirements Specification (SRS) is the key documentation, defining the functional and non-functional system requirements. By revisiting a number of in the literature much discussed key aspects related to SRS and extracting essential views from the author’s daily work experience, this papers stresses the importance of the SRS and examines the process, which enables the emergence of a q...

State observer is an essential component in computerized control loops for greenhouse-crop systems. However, the current accomplishments of observer modeling for greenhouse-crop systems mainly focus on mass/energy balance, ignoring physiological responses of crops. As a result, state observers for crop physiological responses are rarely developed, and control operations are typically made based...

This paper proposes that requirements engineering for COTS-based business systems should be flexible to cater for changes in users’ requirements during the development process. It suggests exposing in real-time the traceability of development activity to user requirements as a key mechanism to facilitate communication between the systems development and user communities. The channels of communi...

The requirements elicited from stakeholders are typically informal, incomplete, ambiguous, and inconsistent. It is the task of Requirements Engineering to transform them into an eligible (formal, sufficiently complete, unambiguous, consistent, modifiable and traceable) requirements specification of functions and qualities that the system-to-be needs to operationalize. To address this requiremen...

User requirements look at the functionality of the software product from the perspectives of the various users of that product. They define what the software has to do in order for the users to accomplish their objectives. In order to fulfill a business requirement, there may be multiple user level requirements. For example, the business requirement to allow the customer to pay for the gas at t...

The primary measure of success of a software system is the level to which it meets the purpose for which it was projected and requirements engineering (RE) is the process of discovering that purpose. The RE process includes five distinct phases: Requirements Elicitation, Requirements Analysis & Negotiation, Requirements Documentation, Requirements Verification & Validation, and Requirements Man...

Requirements Evolution is one of the main issues that affect development activities as well as system features (e.g., system dependability). Although researchers and practitioners recognise the importance of requirements evolution, research results and experience are still patchy. This points out a lack of methodologies that address requirements evolution. This thesis investigates the current u...

Software development teams are often geographically distributed from their customers and end users. This creates significant communication and coordination challenges that impact the effectiveness of requirements engineering. Travel costs, and the local availability of quality technical staff increase the demand for effective distributed software development teams. This research reports an empi...