Towards Engineering Purposeful Systems: A Requirements Engineering Perspective

A number of studies [1][2][3] show that systems fail due to an inadequate or insufficient understanding of the requirements they seek to address. Further, the amount of effort needed to fix these systems has been found to be very high [4]. To correct this situation, it is necessary to address the issue of requirements elicitation, validation, and specification in a relatively more focused manner. The expectation is that as a result of this, more acceptable systems will be developed in the future. The field of requirements engineering has emerged to meet this expectation. Requirements Engineering extends the ‘what is done by the system’ approach with the ‘why is the system like this’ view. This ‘why’ question is answered in terms of organizational objectives and their impact on information systems supporting the organization. In other words, information systems are seen as fulfilling a certain purpose in an organization and requirements engineering helps in the conceptualization of these purposeful systems.