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Basically, and roughly speaking, requirements engineering, which is

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also called in short, RE, is the process

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of establishing the services that the customer requires

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from the software system. In addition to that, requirements

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engineering also has to do with the constraints

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under which the system operates and is developed. Requirements

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engineering is a very important activity for several

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reasons. In particular, as we also saw in earlier

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lessons, many errors are made in requirement specifications. So many

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errors are made because we don't do requirements engineering in

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the right way. And many of these errors are not

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being detected early. But they could be if we were

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to do RE in the right way. And, unfortunately, not

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detecting these errors can dramatically increase software costs. So that's

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the reason why requirements engineering is important, and why it

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is important to do it in the right way. The final

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result of the requirements engineering process is a software

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requirements specification that we also called SRS. We will discuss

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SRS later in more details and also when we talk

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about the projects for the course. For now, it is

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enough to say that the software requirements specification and

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the requirements engineering, in general, should focus on what the

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proposed system is intended to do, and not on the

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how it will do it. In fact, how the system

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will do what it is required to do is something that we

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will discuss when we talk about design of a system in later phases.