Requirement
Origin
Old French requerement , requierement request, petition, reclamation
Definitions
- 1: a : something wanted or needed : necessity <production was not sufficient to satisfy military requirements>
- b : something essential to the existence or occurrence of something else : condition <failed to meet the school's requirements for graduation>
Description
In engineering, a requirement is a singular documented physical and functional need that a particular product or service must be or perform. It is most commonly used in a formal sense in systems engineering, software engineering, or enterprise engineering. It is a statement that identifies a necessary attribute, capability, characteristic, or quality of a system for it to have value and utility to a user.
In the classical engineering approach, sets of requirements are used as inputs into the design stages of product development. Requirements are also an important input into the verification process, since tests should trace back to specific requirements. Requirements show what elements and functions are necessary for the particular project.
The requirements development phase may have been preceded by a feasibility study, or a conceptual analysis phase of the project. The requirements phase may be broken down into requirements elicitation (gathering, understanding, reviewing, and articulating the needs of the stakeholders), analysis (checking for consistency and completeness), specification (documenting the requirements) and validation (making sure the specified requirements are correct).[1]
