CPRE study plan

Define requirements engineering in your own words and distinguish it from project management, design, and testing, citing at least three boundary criteria.

Map the CPRE requirements engineering framework (the four activity areas: elicitation, documentation, validation/negotiation, management) onto a one-page diagram you draw from memory.

List and classify the main requirement types (system vs. software, functional vs. non-functional, constraints) with two original examples per type.

Explain the roles of stakeholder, requirements engineer, and tester in a requirements process, and identify three typical interface problems between them.

Identify and categorize stakeholders for two different sample systems, including hidden and indirect stakeholders, and justify each inclusion.

Select an elicitation technique (interview, workshop, observation, document analysis, questionnaire, prototyping) for five given scenarios and justify each choice against cost, risk, and information quality.

Draft a structured interview guide of ten open questions for a fictional stakeholder, avoiding leading and solution-prescribing phrasing.

Describe how to detect and resolve conflicting stakeholder goals in a facilitated workshop, naming at least three conflict-resolution tactics.

Write requirements in natural language following quality rules: active voice, one requirement per sentence, no vague terms, defined units and thresholds.

Apply the quality characteristics of a good requirement (unambiguous, complete, consistent, verifiable, feasible, necessary, traceable) to rewrite ten deliberately flawed requirements.

Draft a glossary entry for every domain term used in your rewritten requirements to eliminate synonym and homonym ambiguity.

Construct a simple requirements document outline (purpose, scope, stakeholders, functional, non-functional, constraints, glossary) and populate two sections with original content.

Distinguish functional from non-functional requirements and write at least eight non-functional requirements covering performance, reliability, usability, security, and maintainability with measurable acceptance thresholds.

Apply a quality model to organize non-functional requirements into categories and explain why each category matters to verification.

Write acceptance criteria for five requirements in a given/when/then or checklist form and confirm each is objectively testable.

Review a peer-style sample specification and log at least ten defects with severity and rationale.

Explain the purpose and structure of requirements documentation standards and select an appropriate level of detail for three project types (agile, regulated, safety-critical).

Create a requirements information model showing requirement attributes (ID, priority, source, status, rationale, owner, verification method).

Describe how modeling techniques such as use cases, context diagrams, and data models complement textual requirements, and draft one small model of your own.

Identify documentation risks such as over-specification, redundancy, and stale content, and propose a mitigation for each.

Plan a requirements validation activity by choosing review, inspection, or prototyping for given contexts and justifying the choice.

Run a structured requirements inspection on a short specification using a defined checklist, recording roles, findings, and dispositions.

Explain how to verify requirement quality against the characteristics from week 3 and design a checklist of at least 12 checkpoints.

Describe negotiation and prioritization of requirements, applying at least two prioritization approaches and stating their trade-offs.

Explain requirements management activities: identification, change control, versioning, baseline, and status tracking, and describe how they interact.

Design a change request workflow with at least five states and define entry and exit criteria for each state.

Build a traceability approach linking stakeholder needs to requirements to test cases, and explain forward and backward traceability with a worked example.

Assess the impact of a sample change request across affected requirements, tests, and effort, and document the impact analysis.

Consolidate the framework by re-drawing the activity map from memory and checking it against your week 1 version, noting every gap.

Take two timed practice sets of mixed requirements engineering questions and classify every miss by root cause (knowledge gap, misreading, terminology).

Re-teach the five weakest concepts in writing, each in under 150 words, without consulting notes.

Assemble a one-page exam-day checklist of recurring traps such as confusing validation with verification and verification with testing.