A Novel Approach for Specifying Functional and Non-functional Requirements Using RDS (Requirement Description Schema)

Abstract

Requirement Engineering demands a granular level of requirement specifications with key objectives, design constraints and relevant artefacts. There exist some structured approaches, but still these are not complete and do not have open formats that describe requirements of a system/project with its artefacts. This paper introduces RDS (Requirement Description Schema), an XML-based versatile specification approach for the structural representation of functional and non-functional requirements (NFR). The approach is an efficient way of managing requirement metadata and comprehensive artefacts of requirements like status, priority, version, stability, elicitation source etc. The paper comprises a case study of online examination system for validating the instances with RDS.