System requirements specification

A System Requirements Specification is a document where the requirements of a system that is planned to be developed are listed.

A Business analyst (BA), sometimes titled System analyst, is responsible for analysing the business needs of their clients and stakeholders to help identify business problems and propose solutions. Within the systems development life cycle domain, the BA typically performs a liaison function between the business side of an enterprise and the information technology department or external service providers.

Typical deliverables

Business Requirements constitute a specification of simply what the business wants. This is usually expressed in terms of broad outcomes the business requires, rather than specific functions the system may perform. Specific design elements are usually outside the scope of this document, although design standards may be referenced.

• Example: The ability to add notes to a project plan and.

Functional Requirements describe what the system, process, or product/service must do in order to fulfill the business requirement(s). Note that the business requirement often can be broken up into sub-business requirements and many functional requirements. These are often referred to as System Requirements.

• An example that follows from previous business requirement example: (1) System must provide the ability to associate notes to a project plan. (2) System must allow the user to enter free text to the project plan notes, up to 255 characters in length.

Non Functional Requirements are requirements that cannot be met by a specific function, e.g. performance, scalability, security and usability requirements. These are often included within the System Requirements, where applicable.

Report Specifications are reporting requirements such as the purpose of the report, justification of the report, report attributes and columns, or runtime parameters.

The Traceability Matrix is a cross matrix that traces the requirements through each stage of the requirements gathering process. High level concepts will be matched to scope items which will map to individual requirements which will map to corresponding functions. This matrix should also take into account any changes in scope during the life of the project. At the end of a project, this matrix should show each function built into a system, its source and the reason that any stated requirements may not have been delivered.

See also

• Requirements analysis
• Business requirements engineering
• Business process reengineering
• Systems analysis
• Business Analysis
• Information technology
• Use case
• Process modelling
• Data modeling