Does anyone know who the first (systems-, software-, ...) engineer was to coin this term? Merriam-Webster says the term has been around since 1662.
I will soon be looking at the paper titled “Conceptual models for determining information requirements” by J. C. Miller, 1964, but I don't know if this is a match yet.
The first software engineering paper to implicitly define the term was presented by Royce in 1970.
W. W. Royce, “Managing the development of large software systems,” presented at the IEEE WESCON, 1970, pp. 1–9.
The first software engineering paper to dedicate a section to the term was the one by Bell and Thayer of 1976.
T. E. Bell and T. A. Thayer, “Software requirements: Are they really a problem?,” presented at the 2nd international conference on Software engineering, San Francisco, California, United States, 1976, pp. 61–68.
Do you know earlier ones?
http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=800253.807650&coll=DL&dl=GUIDE&CFID=171331106&CFTOKEN=48689103
I had a look at MIL-STD-490A (1985) the successor military standard to MIL-STD-490 (1968). MIL-STD-490 was cited by Bell and Thayer. Unfortunately, I was unable to get the original standard, so I can't say whether the paragraph I will be citing was in the original document or not. If the paragraph was included in the 1968 version, we would have an earlier document where the term requirement was defined, and not only for software, but any engineering profession. In the 1985 document, we can find the following paragraph on page 31:
"4.3 Section 3 - REQUIREMENTS. The essential requirements and descriptions that apply to performance, design, reliability, personnel subsystems, etc. of the configuration item, material or process covered by the specification shall be stated in this section. These requirements and descriptions shall define as applicable, the character or quality of the materials, formula, design, construction, performance, reliability, transportability, and product characteristics, chemical, electrical, and physical requirements, dimensions, weight , color, nameplates, product marking, workmanship, etc."
I had a look at Miller's paper. He does not really define the term "information requirement", if equating it with the term "information need" doesn't count as a definition. Unfortunately Miller does not cite anybody so this paper was sort of a dead end.
Bell and Thayer's paper is definitely not the first one on software requirements engineering.
The work of Teichroew seems to fall into the same timespan, if not earlier. See e.g.
D. Teichroew, “A survey of languages for stating requirements for computer-based information systems,” presented at the the December 5-7, 1972, fall joint computer conference, part II, New York, New York, USA, 1972, pp. 1203–1224.
Unfortunately, that paper still does not explicitly give a definition of the term "requirement".
I found a new citation:
"The final element in a data processing problem is the set of operational requirements of the system. These are the requirements that are not related to the logic of the problem [...]"
J. W. Young Jr. and H. K. Kent, “Abstract formulation of data processing problems,” Journal of Industrial Engineering, vol. 9, no. 6, pp. 471–479, November-December 1958.
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