Requirements Analysis
| Title | Requirements Analysis |
| Overview | Students will create and explain a timeline of how a requirement progressed across the life of a particular feature within an OSS project. |
| Prerequisite Knowledge | It would be helpful for students to be familiar with the Software Development Life Cycle (SDLC), and its various models and phases, which often includes Requirements. The difference between plan-based methods like Waterfall, and iterative approaches like Agile will allow students to see the very different methods of requirements gathering.
Having a knowledge of Cloud-Computing will help in the ManageIQ example, but teachers could easily use other projects, or tell students to ignore the details of cloud computing for now. |
| Learning Objectives | Upon completion, students should:
|
Background:
Background reading material:
- https://www.atlassian.com/agile/requirements/
- https://www.acm.org/education/CS2013-final-report.pdf#page=178 Bottom of Page 178 (Page 181 marked in the PDF)
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Requirements_analysis
- http://news.slashdot.org/story/00/10/23/1250228/gathering-requirements-in-open-source-projects
- https://books.google.com/books?id=-GmZBgAAQBAJ&pg=PA20&lpg=PA20
- http://programmers.stackexchange.com/questions/175766/how-are-requirements-determined-in-open-source-software-projects
What is the rational for this activity? As software development migrates from Waterfall to Agile / Iterative development models, it will be important to understand how requirements fits into each. Open source projects often have a less formal requirements gathering process than say a government contract job, but it is still there behind the covers. Students should be aware of how requirements are gathered in a distributed diverse community, versus a single central authority.
Directions:
- After reading background docs, have students explain how requirements are held and managed in both traditional waterfall SDLC methods and agile / iterative SDLC methods
- Now, show students the two requirements / features / issue tracker. Give context so that they know was community and one was an offshoot team
- Have students document and explain a timeline of how a requirement progressed across the life of a particular feature within an OSS project
- Give the students a template question/answer sheet that they must fill out (make a simple PDF)
- Where did the requirement start its life? What did it look like? Who reported it?
- Repeat this for each major step of the life (talk forum to github issue to code)
- Have students compare the two requirement examples given
- Why do you think requirements were done in a different way?
- What did one method gain or lose over the other?
ManageIQ Intro
In this activity, we will look at the ManageIQ open source community. ManageIQ is a cloud-enabled management platform (CMP) that lets you monitor, start/stop, and analyze servers & applications in a corporate cloud infrastructure. So, for example, a company decides to make its own set of cloud resources inside their own company, in a big data-room. They have hundreds of machines helping their employees to run servers and web applications. They might use ManageIQ to help keep it all under control and running smoothly. ManageIQ is made in a communal open source fashion. Keep in mind, that this community used to be proprietary and closed - when Red Hat acquired them, they have slowly been moving toward open and communal ways. It is a good ongoing lesson in how to "go open".
Links
- ManageIQ (RH Cloudforms)
- ManageIQ Github Issues and Creating new Issues
- ManageIQ Trello / Task board
- Discourse tool and Feature discussions
- ManageIQ team (if I want to mention it in passing - just a neat resource to show)
- Forum question/answer around how ManageIQ does Project Management
- Sprint Review Meetings (taped on youtube!)
- Ruby Gem Dependencies
2 Requirements Examples:
Listed below are two features that the ManageIQ open source project took on and implemented (or are still implementing).
Read the various links that follow two feature examples.
- Git Integration Feature
- Initial Discussion,
- They created a Github Issue (bug),
- Code that was implemented - Just take a look here, no need to understand it
- More code - Again, just peak; Notice how the code links to the Issue
- There is even more code, and more to come, that will link back to this Feature. Take note that this code is implemented across a pretty lengthy time-period
- Git Integration Feature
- Chargeback Feature
Deliverables:
What will the student hand in?
Assessment:
How will the activity be graded?
How will learning will be measured?
Include sample assessment questions/rubrics.
| Criteria | Level 1 (fail) | Level 2 (pass) | Level 3 (good) | Level 4 (exceptional) |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Understanding of requirements in context of wider SDLC | ||||
| Explains common methods and tools in oss req. gathering | ||||
| Can track requirements from initial sources through to code |
Comments:
What should the instructor know before using this activity?
What are some likely difficulties that an instructor may encounter using this activity?
Additional Information:
| ACM Knowledge Area/Knowledge Unit | SE - Software Engineering / SE Requirements Engineering from ACM_Body_of_Knowledge |
| ACM Topic | Requirements tracing; Describing functional requirements; Evaluation and use of requirements specifications; from https://www.acm.org/education/CS2013-final-report.pdf |
| Level of Difficulty | Easy |
| Estimated Time to Completion | 2-3 hrs |
| Materials/Environment | Internet access |
| Author | Nick Yeates |
| Source | N/A |
| License | Creative Commons CC-BY |
Suggestions for Open Source Community:
Suggestions for an open source community member who is working in conjunction with the instructor.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License
