https://student.cs.uwaterloo.ca/~cs445/Winter2026/index.html Software Requirements Specification and Analysis Term:Winter 2026 Instructor:Byron Weber Becker Teaching Assistant:Tales Mello Paiva Team Meetings:Tuesdays, 2:30-4:20pm Office Hours: Message the instructor or TA in Teams to book an in-person meeting or on-line chat. Course Website:https://student.cs.uwaterloo.ca/~cs445 Course Email:cs445@cs.uwaterloo.ca (for course-related questions for the instructor) Microsoft Teams:For announcements, team chats, direct messages to instructor or TA Course Delivery This is a “flipped course”. This means that the lecture content is recorded as videos and course contact hours are spent working on project deliverables in-person. Most of the course deliverables are team based. Hugo en-us https://student.cs.uwaterloo.ca/~cs445/Winter2026/calendar/index.html Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000 https://student.cs.uwaterloo.ca/~cs445/Winter2026/calendar/index.html https://student.cs.uwaterloo.ca/~cs445/Winter2026/syllabus/index.html Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000 https://student.cs.uwaterloo.ca/~cs445/Winter2026/syllabus/index.html Calendar Description Introduces students to the requirements definition phase of software development. Models, notations, and processes for software requirements identification, representation, analysis, and validation. Cost estimation from early documents and specifications. Overall Goals CS445/CS645/ECE451 is about the problem of identifying what software to build, such that the end product is useful for stakeholders and users. The course is different from other computing courses in that it focuses on activities and technologies for being efficient and effective in determining what software to build, rather than on knowledge and techniques for how to build the software itself. The course emphasizes people-facing activities of determining requirements (e.g., eliciting needs from stakeholders, seeking user feedback, and negotiation) as well as technical activities, such as requirements analyses, strategies for prioritizing requirements, and notations for modelling and documenting requirements. https://student.cs.uwaterloo.ca/~cs445/Winter2026/project/index.html Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000 https://student.cs.uwaterloo.ca/~cs445/Winter2026/project/index.html Overview The course project for Winter 2026 is a collection of requirements and specification deliverables, including a final Software Requirements Specification (SRS), for a project of your choosing that is hypothetically to be developed by another team. Your team will choose a real-world problem that you think can be addressed or mitigated by software. I encourage you to use this course project as an opportunity to think about how software can be used to improve people’s lives (e.g., improve mental health and happiness, reduce waste and share resources, combat climate change, promote equity and inclusion, etc.). If you are looking for ideas, consider something related to the UN sustainable development goals. Another source of ideas are SE Capstone projects (here and here), but your team needs to find its own problem to tackle. https://student.cs.uwaterloo.ca/~cs445/Winter2026/schedule/index.html Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000 https://student.cs.uwaterloo.ca/~cs445/Winter2026/schedule/index.html Schedule Here is a week-by-week schedule the term’s topics, main deliverables, and due dates. Yellow highlighted deliverables are those that involve consultations with project stakeholders, and cyan highlighted deliverables are those that involve activities with buddy teams. Be sure to plan in advance so that you have sufficient time to schedule and conduct these interviews/meetings and analyze their results. https://student.cs.uwaterloo.ca/~cs445/Winter2026/resources/index.html Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000 https://student.cs.uwaterloo.ca/~cs445/Winter2026/resources/index.html Check the subsections for useful CS445/ECE451 resources.