Task Descriptions as Functional Requirements

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Title -: Task Descriptions as Functional Requirements

Article summary

A software system is built based on the requirements. Therefore requirement elicitation is an important aspect. Functional requirements outline what the system do in order to achieve its goal. A functional requirement is an action which is performed by user / system to achieve a specific goal. The authors Marianne Mathiassen and had developed the Tasks & Support method, which uses annotated task descriptions. As per authors using this process computer and user shall accomplish together without indicating which actor performs.

which parts of the tasks. The author claims that with this approach higher-quality requirements are produced and are faster to produce and easy to verify and validate. This follows a similar phenomena as the definition of use case by Alistair Cockburn , ie use case is what the system does and how it interacts with the user. But tasked based requirement analysis delay splitting the work between the system and the user. In this approach it is considered as a decision to be made later.

The task has following components. The work area description states the formal requirement (R2: The system shall …). It also explains the overall purpose of the task, the environment, the user information. Further conditions and business rules of the task are captured, by as task preconditions or individual task steps, mostly by a pre condition.

Task can have several subtasks which supports the task. There is no sequence of operation in sub tasks. This provides greater flexibility when the requirements changes often. In the real world scenario , most of the time what could have greater possibility to change is how the businesses operated . Sin...

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...analysis is done on task level it is easier to identify dependencies of each task for its completion , what needs to comply with, what are the non functional requirements to fulfill the tasks . The sub tasks in a task can be implemented sequentially or non sequentially.

The effective task analysis takes time. If adequate time is not allocated in the initial project planning ,it will run in to schedule variance. Further during testing it will be difficult to perform integration test . Further their will more hidden things which needs to attend and the difficulty in arriving on estimates.

After completing the task how the result of one task would impact other parts of the system.

Article citation

Faculty of Engineering and Information Technology

University of Technology Sydney, PO Box 123 Broadway, NSW 2007, Australia

(mairiza, didar, nur)@it.uts.edu.au

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