Design Requirements Engineering: A Ten-Year Perspective

Requirements rarely stay still. As software-intensive systems grow, connect with organizations and people, and continue to change after launch, the work of defining what a system should do becomes inseparable from the work of designing it. Design Requirements Engineering: A Ten-Year Perspective gathers research perspectives on that challenge and on how the field might respond.

Drawn from the Design Requirements Workshop held in Cleveland in 2007, this edited collection considers the changing relationship between requirements, design, architecture, business needs, and evolving systems. It is a scholarly volume for readers interested in the ideas shaping requirements engineering and software design.

Rethinking the foundations of design

The opening contributions take up fundamental questions: what counts as design, how design requirements develop, and whether incompleteness can be acknowledged as part of the process rather than treated simply as a defect. These discussions help frame the practical and conceptual problems addressed throughout the book.

When requirements and systems evolve

Several papers examine the fluidity of requirements and their close connection to system architecture. Rather than treating requirements as a fixed checklist completed before implementation, the volume considers how they change, how design decisions respond, and what research is needed to understand that evolution.

Quality, value, and organizational needs

The collection also explores requirements quality, value-based traceability, and the relationship between system functionality and business needs. Its scope extends to topics such as inter-organizational controls and business-process change, showing how requirements work reaches beyond the software specification itself.

A research collection for a changing discipline

With contributions organized across design concepts, evolving requirements, quality and value, and domain-specific practice, this book is best approached as an edited research volume rather than a step-by-step manual. It will be relevant to researchers, graduate students, and experienced practitioners in software engineering and information systems who want to explore foundational debates and research directions in requirements engineering.