Explore
For Enterprise
Join for Free
Log In

Arts and Humanities
Business
Computer Science
Data Science
Information Technology
Health
Math and Logic
Personal Development
Physical Science and Engineering
Social Sciences
Language Learning
Degrees
Certificates

Explore all of Coursera

Browse
Search
For Enterprise
Log In
Join for Free

Getting Started- "I want THIS"

Loading...

Requirements Gathering for Secure Software Development

University of Colorado System

4.5 (146 ratings) | 2.6K Students Enrolled

Course 1 of 5 in the Requirements Engineering: Secure Software Specifications Specialization

In Software Requirements Elicitation for Secure Software Development, we're going to discuss the overall software requirements process as it applies in waterfall, spiral, and agile models. You'll learn about each of these processes and your goals as a software requirements analyst. This is not an easy task! Who do you talk to, when, and what kind of knowledge are you trying to obtain, in any software life cycle? How do you handle obstacles as you go? These are the questions we will focus on answering in this specialization.

Skills You'll Learn

Requirements Elicitation, Requirements Analysis, Software Requirements, Requirements Engineering

Reviews

4.5 (146 ratings)

5 stars
102 ratings
4 stars
22 ratings
3 stars
12 ratings
2 stars
9 ratings
1 star
1 ratings

RK

Feb 21, 2018

The instructor is too good. And her wit is wonderful.

NM

Mar 12, 2019

The best and advanced way of learning with COURSERA

From the lesson

The Software Requirement Specification Process and Cost

Software Requirements are a vital part of the Software Development Lifecycle. While there are many ways to go about collecting and recording requirements, the cost of bad requirements is high. Here we discuss what Software Requirements Specifications are and some challenges in writing them well.

Getting Started- "I want THIS"3:26

Taught By

Kristen Walcott-Justice
Assistant Professor

Transcript

To emphasize the challenges that we face,

please consider this example and think about it for a couple of minutes.

Consider the case of somebody coming to you and saying,

"I work in immunology and I want a website that will search

a database and report severe outbreaks of the disease that I searched for.

My bosses hired you to construct the site.

Good luck."

So I want you to think about how you would develop a set of requirements to describe

what you're going to do based on just this bit of information.

First, who would you talk to? What information do you need to learn?

Just from this description,

what kinds of questions do you need to ask?

Please take a minute and think about this.

When you looked at this issue,

when you looked at this potential project,

all of you likely came up with very different things.

One of the first questions to ask from that description was, what's severe?

What defines a severe outbreak?

Severe could be regional,

a regional outbreak, it could be international.

What are we looking at?

By the way, as a customer,

I also forgot to tell you that,

there's already a database out there that you could be using, sort of.

You need to clarify what that database is and how you can use it.

And if you can use it.

Another thing I forgot to mention as a customer is that,

my intern shouldn't be allowed to use the database.

People need to log in with proper qualifications.

Follow up question.

What are proper qualifications?

Within software requirements, you are constantly asking the question, why?

Why are we doing this?

Why are we doing this?

Why are we doing this?

You feel like a five-year-old asking why the sky is blue and continually asking.

Many times it becomes our job to discover the requirements.

For example, if I said,

"Please find me a rock."

You might ask, "What size of rock?

Do you want a gemstone or a rock?"

"Wait, you actually won, Dwayne Johnson."

He's the rock of TV and movie fame.

So you have many questions to ask that.

As another example, I could ask you as my requirements engineer to build me a house.

Size, levels, location, mobility,

the list goes on and on.

Software is very tricky and customers

often lose the sense of responsibility over the product.

And is up to you to figure that out.

Customers will look at it and say,

"You handle the computer stuff."

It's your job to figure out how to convert the customer's stuff to the computer stuff.

So now we're going to get into how we can do that effectively and efficiently.

Explore our Catalog

Join for free and get personalized recommendations, updates and offers.

Coursera provides universal access to the world’s best education, partnering with top universities and organizations to offer courses online.

© 2019 Coursera Inc. All rights reserved.

Download on the App Store

Get it on Google Play

Coursera
About
Leadership
Careers
Catalog
Certificates
MasterTrack™ Certificates
Degrees
For Enterprise
For Government

Community
Learners
Partners
Developers
Beta Testers
Translators

Connect
Blog
Facebook
LinkedIn
Twitter
Instagram
YouTube
Tech Blog

More
Terms
Privacy
Help
Accessibility
Press
Contact
Directory
Affiliates