Managing Software Requirements: A Use Case Approach, Second Edition

Chapter 24. Technical Methods for Specifying Requirements

Key Points

• Technical methods for specifying requirements are appropriate when the requirement description is too complex for natural language or if you cannot afford to have the specification misunderstood.

• Technical methods include pseudocode, finite state machines, decision trees, activity diagrams, entity-relationship models, and many others.

Throughout this book, we have assumed that most requirements will be written in the team's natural language via the use-case method or in the context of a supplementary specification. We also suggested that requirements can readily be augmented with diagrams, tables, charts, or other techniques to help clarify the meaning. But as we described in the ...