Requirements Engineering: Laying a Firm Foundation

This textbook lays the foundations for System-of-Systems Requirements Engineering and Requirements Management practices, principles, technique, and processes. It provides a comprehensive treatment of requirements engineering, an integral part of Multidisciplinary Systems Engineering. The book takes the student/reader though the entire process of documenting, analyzing, tracing, prioritizing, and managing requirements, and then goes on the describe controlling and communicating requirement change throughout the system development lifecycle. The authors discuss the role of requirements management in support of other requirements engineering processes; describe the principal requirements engineering activities and their relationships; introduces techniques for requirements elicitation and analysis and describes requirements validation and the role of requirements reviews; and discusses the role of requirements management in support of other requirements engineering processes. A full suite of classroom material is provided including exercises, assignments, and PowerPoint slides.

Dr. James Crowder  currently serves as a Systems Fellow for Colorado Engineering Inc. and Subject Matter Expert (SME) in Autonomous Systems, Artificial Intelligence, and Systems Architecture. He holds a BS in Electrical Engineering, an MS in Electrical Engineering in Signal Processing, an MS in Applied Mathematics, and a PhD in Electrical Engineering and Applied Mathematics. Dr. Crowder has several patents pending in Artificial Intelligence and has over 120 published, peer-reviewed papers. Recent book publishing efforts with Springer include Artificial Cognition Architectures, Systems Engineering, Agile Design Methodologies, and Agile Project Management: Managing for Success, as well as chapters in several books on Big Data, Biomedical Engineering, and Cyber Physical Systems. His professional efforts include serving as a technical advisor and mentor to a STEM school in Douglas Country, Colorado, the Alexandria School of Innovation, as well as a technical reviewer for the Journal of Supercomputing and the Journal of Systemics, Cybernetics, and Informatics. Dr. Crowder has been interviewed, and articles have written about his work in Artificial Intelligence, by Popular Science, Defense One, the Washington Post, Discovery News, and has written an article for TechCrunch that was published in June 2016.

Curtis Hoff has 35 years’ experience in the design, development, production and fielding of advanced multi-spectral sensing systems for both commercial and military applications – for both domestic and international customers. The first 8 years were spent in hardware design, integration and acceptance testing of both one-of-a-kind and high volume production systems – focusing on advanced broadband RF direction finding systems. The remaining 27 years were spent as a systems engineer (SE) / SE lead / SE Director developing advanced, high-performance multi-spectral hardware and software-based sensing and communication systems for Command, Control, Communications, Computers, Intelligence, Surveillance and Reconnaissance (C4ISR) applications. 

He has experience in all development, production and fielding phases - from conceptual design and architecture development; through system design including specification definition and allocation, internal and external interface definition; system integration and test plans and procedures; and system fielding activities.

In addition to his experience in system development, he has also been responsible for the development of the associated SE processes, procedures and objective metrics necessary to support SE program activities and report to company and customer management teams.

Curtis holds an MSEE from Southern Methodist University with focus in RF and communication systems, and an MBA from the University of Texas at Dallas with emphasis in finance and program management.