ETSN15 Software Requirements Engineering

About

Credits: 7,5 hp. Period: VT1 (lp3). Plan: ETSN15. Head of course: Björn Regnell

Requirements Engineering (RE) is the foundation for innovation and decision-making in software development. In this course you will learn useful theories and practical methods for how to dig up, understand, write down, check, prioritize, decide on, and track the features and qualities of software products.

An anniversary column on 40 years of Requirements Engineering that discuss several topics in this course: “Viewing Requirements Engineering Through a Ruby Lens”

Links

• Schedule 2025 in TimeEdit
• Course Program
• Project description
• Ladok login
• Canvas Login
• Open Source:
  • Course Documentation
  • The reqT tool
  • Work in progress: Requirements Engineering Book

Lectures

Lectures from past years will be updated week-by-week until the actual lecture is given. Check link name below to see if the PDF link is from this year or from the past year and beware of possibly outdated information from past year.

Exercises

The exercise classes support you in working on your course project. After an initial quick walk-through of the concepts for the week, the rest of the time is spent working on practical exercises. Most of the assignments are to be performed on your projects, so ideally the whole project group should attend together.

The exercise instructions will be published on this page as the course progresses, and the slides used during the initial walk-through are published after the weekly session.

NOTE: Ensure you have access to the course textbook [Lau] during exercises.

• Ex1: Req’s Types, Project Types & Models (Lau:1), Context diagram (Lau:3). E1-slides.pdf
• Ex2: Specification I and Elicitation (Lau:2, 8). E2-slides.pdf
• Ex3: Prototyping (PROTO1&2), Functional Requirements (Lau:3-5). E3-slides.pdf
• Ex4: Quality Requirements (Lau:6 + QUPER). E4-slides.pdf
• Ex5: Validation (Lau: Ch 9, [INSP]). E5-slides.pdf

Project

• A description of the course project with mandatory deliverables and grading criteria is available here: https://fileadmin.cs.lth.se/krav/project-ETSN15.pdf with source code here
• See lectures for further instructions on supervision and how to deliver your results.
• In the last week of the course you should attend the mandatory oral project examination.
• The project missions for previous years are available below:
  • 2025 Project missions (alfa: squulgame, beta: edubee, gamma: easyTrip, delta: imMune)
  • 2024 Project missions
  • 2023 Project missions
  • 2022 Project missions
  • 2021 Project missions
  • 2020 Project missions

Labs

Preparations: Visit reqT.github.io and follow instructions under Getting Started. Then follow instructions below, including mandatory preparations for each lab.

• Lab 1: Context, Features and Priorities

• Lab 2: Quality requirements and Release Planning

reqT is an open source requirements engineering tool written in Scala and suitable for course projects.

Download the reqT desktop app from here and run in terminal with:

java -jar reqT.jar

reqT is used in the Labs of this course.

reqT is developed using Scala 3. You can learn more about Scala with the open source course material from this course: Introduction to Programming using Scala

Quality Requirements

Quality requirements (QR) cover how good the functionality needs to be and include aspects such as: Performance, Capacity, Reliability, Usability, Safety, Security, Interoperability, Maintainability, …

Here is a talk from Öredev 2009 by Björn Regnell:

Stream from Youtube: https://youtu.be/mdiBpDwciC0

Download mp4 (402 MB): http://fileadmin.cs.lth.se/krav/quper-oredev-2009.mp4

Literature

Downloadable pdfs of papers below are available in Canvas.

• [Lau] Soren Lauesen, Software Requirements - Styles and Techniques, AddisonWesley, ISBN 0-201-74570-4, 2002.

• [MDRE] Regnell, Björn, and Sjaak Brinkkemper. “Market-driven requirements engineering for software products.” Engineering and managing software requirements. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg, ISBN 3-540-25043- 32005. pp. 287-308. pdf

• [PRIO] Berander, Patrik, and Anneliese Andrews. “Requirements prioritization.” Engineering and managing software requirements. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg, 2005. 69-94. ISBN 3-540-25043-3, 2005. pdf

• [OSSRE] Scacchi, Walt. “Understanding requirements for open source software.” Design requirements engineering: A ten-year perspective. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg, 2009. 467-494. pdf

• [RP] Ruhe, Gunther, and Moshood Omolade Saliu. “The art and science of software release planning.” IEEE software 22.6 (2005): 47-53. doi: 10.1109/MS.2005.164

• [QUPER] Regnell, Björn, Richard Berntsson Svensson, and Thomas Olsson. “Supporting roadmapping of quality requirements.” IEEE software 25.2 (2008). doi: 10.1109/MS.2008.48

• [PROTO] Bjarnason, E., Lang, F., & Mjöberg, A. “An empirically based model of software prototyping: a mapping study and a multi-case study.” Empirical Software Engineering, 28(5), 115. (2023)

• [INSP] Karlsson, Joachim. ”Att inspektera krav”. Framgångsrik kravhantering, andra utgåvan, Teknikföretagen, V040072, ISSN 1103-7008, Sid 67-76, 1998.

• [INTDEP] Carlshamre, Pär, et al. “An industrial survey of requirements interdependencies in software product release planning.” Proceedings of Fifth IEEE International Symposium on Requirements Engineering, pp. 84–91, 2001. doi: 10.1109/ISRE.2001.948547

• [AGRE] Cao, Lan, and Balasubramaniam Ramesh. “Agile requirements engineering practices: An empirical study.” IEEE software 25.1, pp. 60-67, 2008. doi: 10.1109/MS.2008.1

Exams

• 2025-08-21: exam and marking guide
• 2025-03-30: exam and marking guide
• 2024-03-15: exam and marking guide
• 2023-03-17: exam and marking guide
• 2022-03-18: exam with correct answers for U1, and guide for U2 and U3
• 2019-03-22: exam with correct answers (U1) and guide (U3)

Dictionary

A quick reference of requirements modeling terminology including entities, attributes and relations, is available here: reqT Quickref

The glossary below contains some of the most common requirements engineering terms used in this course. If you think of a word that should be included, please email bjorn.regnell@cs.lth.se

Another glossary is provided by IREB with requirements engineering terms in Swedish here: IREB_CPRE_Glossary_14.pdf (see page 94 and onwards).