Advisable prior study
Contents
Completion of 12 points of programming-based units is a prerequisite for enrolling in CITS5501. In particular, it’s assumed that you are familiar with programming in at least one statically type-checked language (typically either C or Java). Please let the Unit Coordinator know as soon as possible if this is not the case.
Advisable prior study for the unit is:
- familiarity with a statically type-checked language (e.g. Java, C), and
- CITS3301/CITS4401 Software Requirements and Design.
Statically type-checked languages
We assume you are familiar with
- the difference between compile-time and run-time errors
- protections provided by a type system
- the difference between interface and implementation (abstraction, or information hiding)
If not, you will need to familiarize yourself with the basic concepts. We provide some starting points here, but it’s your responsibility to ensure you have a good understanding of these concepts.
Software requirements
We assume you are already familiar with
- what a software requirement is and how to express one
- the difference between functional and non-functional requirements
- what makes for good or bad software requirements
If not, you will need to familiarize yourself with the basic concepts. We provide some starting points here, but it’s your responsibility to ensure you have a good understanding of these concepts.
- Requirements engineering lecture slides
-
A good source of information is the CITS4401 lecture materials. The current content is contained in the University’s Blackboard LMS system, but you may be able to obtain access to it by contacting the unit coordinator for CITS4401. The relevant lectures are the ones on requirements engineering.
Other sets of lecture slides you might find helpful include those from the University of Michigan course EECS 481 Software Engineering, available here and archived here. Particularly relevant slides are the ones on Requirements and Specification and on Elicitation, Validation and Risk.
The Carnegie Mellon University course 17-313 Foundations of Software Engineering has useful slides on requirements engineering here, archived here. The most relevant slides are the ones on Requirements (Introduction), Requirements (Elicitation and documentation), and Requirements (Validation and risk).
- Requirements engineering online lectures
-
Daniel Mendez of the Blekinge Institute of Technology, Sweden, has an excellent series of video lectures on requirements engineering.
You can find the full list of lectures on YouTube here.
Another good series of lecures is by Grischa Liebel. You can a playlist of requirements engineering lectures on YouTube here. The relevant lectures are from Module 1 on Requirements engineering.