The Role of Requirement Engineering in Software Development Life Cycle

The Requirement Engineering (RE) is the most important phase of the software development life cycle (SDLC). This phase is used to translate the imprecise, incomplete needs and wishes of the potential users of software into complete, precise and formal specifications. The specifications act as the contract between the software users and the developers. Therefore the importance of Requirement Engineering is enormous to develop effective software and in reducing software errors at the early stage of the development of software. Since Requirement Engineering (RE) has great role in different stages of the SDLC, its consideration in software development is crucial. There exist a number of approaches for requirement engineering. Among the approaches, object-based and problem domain-based approaches are widely used. An effective analysis of methods is essential for the appropriate capturing of requirements. Taking the above viewpoint into account, this paper demonstrates an effective method of requirement engineering, which plays an important role in different phases of the SDLC. Hospital can be seen as an example of a complex system. Therefore, the paper considers Hospital as a case study for which a software system has been developed taking the mentioned approach into account.