The Requirement Cube

Abstract

Requirements engineering activities are carried out to come up with right and suitable quality requirements. However, problems in requirements engineering remain even though there is a vast amount of requirement elicitation and writing methods. Methods are either too specific for industry application or focus on a specific part of requirements engineering. This paper proposes a new requirement writing template, the 5W1H requirement cube. The template consists of the answers to six questions (Why, Who, When, Where, What, and How) and links business, user, and functional requirements in a hierarchy within the enterprise business architecture. The template was developed in a prominent Islamic Bank in Turkey and tested on a case study. Authors have rewritten three software requirement specification (SRS) documents with new approach and compared them, showing that new approach has more brief and well-organized documents. BOA Cube software has been developed to implement the 5W1H requirement cube approach within the organization.