Demand Engineering Series (I)-difficulties in software requirements-analysis replaces requirements

Over the past decade, the domestic software engineering progress has been obvious to all. In terms of software requirements, we can see that a level-1 or level-2 Demand System (Business and software requirements) has been established in most organizations ); in some organizations, demand analysts have become specialized positions, and even a specialized department has been set up in a large state-owned commercial bank to take charge of demand analysis. It should be said that this is some very gratifying progress. However, most of the current project participants are dissatisfied with the current situation of the demand project. Why? First, we must acknowledge that the rapid changes in the market have indeed brought great challenges to the project. For this reason, many projects have applied iterative development to deal with such changes. However, according to our interviews with customers, more demand changes are caused by poor communication. That is to say, the parties involved in the communication did not reach a real consensus, what is the reason for this? According to our analysis, this is mainly because of the lack of a demand system that can be truly understood and communicated by all parties and gradually refined. Currently, most users use the document system of structured analysis (including data flow charts and data dictionaries ). This document system originated in 1970s. At that time, the main application of software was scientific computing or information processing. People who understood the needs were often educated about structural analysis, however, most of today's content is hard to understand for business personnel or end users. The main problem here is: Analysis replaces requirements. To solve this problem, some organizations have introduced non-formal and non-structured business requirements, but it is difficult to establish a clear correspondence between the two requirements, as a result, the business personnel/End Users recognize the business requirements, but the developers feel that they are not detailed enough. The developers recognize the software requirements, but the business personnel/end users cannot confirm the requirements. So, how can we solve the dilemma of this software demand? (To be continued)