The goal of the RE course is to support students in gaining deep knowledge about the important concepts, activities, practices and approaches of RE. The purpose of this material is to summarise the most important topics, concepts and models of the RE course.

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Requirements engineering relates closely to user-centred design and service design. These three disciplines support and complement each other very well. User-centred design provides a large amount of methods an practices that highlight the perspective of users. Service design is based on user-centred approach and methods. It also emphasises the importance of creativity and visualisation. Requirements engineering is part of software engineering that focuses on the systematic and agile analysis of the problem and especially customer and user needs.

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The purpose of this session is to summarise the most important topics of the course. Based on this material and material of the other study sessions, you know where to focus on when reading the articles.

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This figure gives on overview of the important activities of requirements engineering. The main focus of this course is on requirements definition that contains four basic activities of RE. These four basic activities are: 1) requirements elicitation: understanding the problem and current situation, discovering

customer and user needs (explicit and hidden needs)2) requirements analysis: analysing gathered information and data about the current

situation and identifying the most important and promising needs3) requirements representation: documenting the most important and complex

requirements systematically4) requirements validation: checking with users and other stakeholders whether

represented requirements satisfy important needs of users, getting feedback about requirements, and ensuring the quality of requirements

Customer value evaluation is a new and important topic in RE. It is about analysing and assessing how well the solution satisfies customer and user needs, and what kind of value (benefits and sacrifices) the usage of the solution creates.

Requirements change management is about how to make systematically decisions on requirements changes. These changes can be minor modifications which can be done easily. They can also be major ones and then decision requires more analysis work (why it needed, what needs to be changed and done, how important the change is, when it can be done,…). This activity has been covered only lightly in this course.

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The RE process model is a visualisation, the purpose of which is to support communication and collaboration• within the development team• with different stakeholders

This process model contains only basic RE activities.

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This is one example how to visualise agile RE process. The article describes what kind of challenges the large development project had when using prototyping as a core RE practice to guide the development work. It also describes how these challenges can be solved by improving the agile RE process. The improvement actions have been highlighted using red colour in the process model.

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This page summarises a set of good RE practices that can used for discovering customer and user needs. In addition, it is good to identify other important stakeholders that can have knowledge about the current situation. It is also possible that there are lot of other information sources such as reports, blogs, standards, marketing material,…. that can be used for understanding the current situation and the problem to be solved.

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This page summarises a set of good RE practices that are recommended for analysing, representing and validating requirements. The article of Komssi et al. (2010) contains knowledge about workshops and different kinds of reviews that are important RE practices to be used during requirements validation.

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This page highlights the importance of prototypes and workshops that can used and applied in all the four basic RE activities (elicitation, analysis, representation and validation).

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This page gives a high-level view on how the focus of traditional and agile RE approaches can be summarised.

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This page summarises good RE practices that are described in the articles of Hofmann and Lehner (2001) and Cao and Ramesh (2008). The purpose of Assignment 2 was to analyse these practices and identify good RE practices that can support customer value creation.

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Although customer value is a pretty widely used concept in practice, people do not often have a good understanding of what customer value means. This page summarises a small set of key characteristics of customer value. The main point is to understand that customer value is created in customers’ processes when people are using the solution. Note: Customer value is not created in the development process of the solution. Typically, many people think that customer value is embedded into the solution during the development process.

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This page offers a simple formula how customer value can also be understood. In addition to concrete and sometimes measurable benefits and sacrifices, emotions perceived by users are an important part of customer value.

Think about why we are using this summative formula (benefits – sacrifices) and not ratio (benefits/sacrifices).

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This figure shows how complex concept customer value is. It is important to analyse the content of this figure and understand what different aspects can mean in practice.

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The outside-in approach highlights the importance of understanding the current situation especially the current processes of customers and users. It is also important to understand that there are typically several customer segments and users groups that have different needs. The purpose of the solution is to support and improve the customer’s processes. In the outside-in approach, it is essential to create a big picturenot focusing on individual features.

The inside-approach is pretty typical in many organisations that want to develop a solution quickly. These organisations see that features are the core of value creation. Many development teams treat customers and users as one big group and they have not defined different customer segments and user groups. Their knowledge about the customers’ processes can also be pretty limited and they do not have a big picture that can guide their work. The focus is on feature development and the key idea can be: The more features the solution contains, the more value the solution will provide.

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This page summarises three practices that can be applied during RE activities in order to support customer value creation. These are examples and there are lot of other practices that can also support customer value creation. Think about which other RE practices can support customer value creation and why.

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Value co-creation is an emerging trend. It focuses on understanding how customers and other stakeholders participate in co-development and what kind of role they can have. User-centred design emphasises the participation of users in the solution development. In practice, the role of user can, however, be pretty passive. They can be interviewed and asked feedback about prototypes. The figure summarises also other roles that users and other stakeholders can have during the co-development of the solution.

The value co-creation refers to the activity of using the solution in a real environment i.e. when the solution is used for its real purpose in a real context. The figure above lists a set of roles that customers can have during value co-creation.

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This figure gives an overview what kind of motives users and other stakeholders can have to participate in the co-development and co-creation. The article written by Nambisan (2009) describes the four different categories of motivators. The figure above gives concrete examples of motives that can be linked to the four categories defined by Nambisan (2009). You can also compare the content of this figure with the value pyramid introduced by Almqvist and Bloch (2016).

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Creativity can defined as a idea generation process. During the RE process, ideas can be new solution concepts and new features. The figure above summarises what kind of knowledge is needed for generating ideas. Customer and user needs are essential sources for new ideas. The better understanding development teams have about customer and user needs, the better ideas they can generate. Market and business knowledge can also be a good source for new ideas. Understanding emerging market trends and knowing the solutions of competitors is essential when generating ideas that differentiate your solution from existing ones. Deep understanding of application domain is essential when development teams want to create new solution concepts and solutions that support and improve users’ current processes.

In order to create good ideas and implement them successfully, it is good to have a multidisciplinary team of persons with different education and knowledge. For example, marketing and sales personnel have a good understanding of market trends and competitors. They typically also have good understanding of market and customer needs. Service designers and user experience experts are typically very good at analysing user needs. Domain experts can also have a significant role in idea generation and solution development. Engineers and other technical experts have knowledge about current and future technologies that can also be a source for new ideas.

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Hidden needs can be an excellent source for new ideas. Hidden needs are those ones that users are not able to articulate explicitly. It is also possible to discover new customer segments and user groups that can use the improved version of the solution.

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This page provides an overview of techniques that can be used for discovering user needs and especially hidden needs.

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Understanding the goals and current processes of users is critical in order to understand their needs. It is also important to analyse physical and social environment where the solution will used. Furthermore, gathering information about users’ characteristics and emotions is essential when discovering needs and developing new ideas. Hidden needs often relates to opportunities that users themselves are not able to see and express. Sometimes, they can be so used to the problems that they are not articulate them explicitly.

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There is often a gap between the business strategy and solution development. One way to reduce this gap is to define solution concepts that provide a big picture for solution development. Typical roadmaps are longer-term plans that used to be based on features and technologies. In agile development, it can be difficult to make feature plans for several years. In this course, we recommend to make roadmaps based on the elements of the solution concept. The following page summarises the elements of the solution concept i.e. what the content of the solution concept is.

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The solution concept contains five elements. The order of the elements is essential. Analyse the order and think about how the elements relate to each other.One important part of the solution concept is to develop a whole solution and not focus only on digital services. The purpose of the whole solution is to support the end-to-end process of the customers. The whole solution can contain for example manual services, marketing material, training and so on.

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Typically, customer segments and customers’ processes do not change very quickly. Based on the solution concept, it is possible to create a roadmap that gives an long-term view for several years. The purpose of the roadmap is to visualise which customer segments and user groups the following versions of the solution will focus on. Furthermore, the roadmap defines which processes and activities of users the following versions of the solution supports. After that, it is possible to decide the development order of the components of the solution.

Based on the roadmap, one can prioritise features.

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Customer value evaluation is an important RE activity. It is about analysing and assessing how well the solution satisfies customer and user needs, and what kind of value (benefits and sacrifices) the usage of the solution creates. It is also essential to evaluate critically strengths and weaknesses of all the outputs of the RE process. The outputs of the RE process are • solution concepts and roadmaps• features = functional requirements and quality requirementsIn addition, customer value evaluation includes the critical analysis of the whole solution (digital and other services) throughout its life cycle.

During the RE activities, it is also essential to do risk assessment and analyse potential ethical issues and long-term consequences of the solution on users, other stakeholders and the society. The long-term consequences can be both positive and negative.

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This page summarises how customer value propositions relate to customer value. It also points out that the same good RE practices can be used for discovering needs and evaluating customer value.

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