Group Support and Change Propagation in Requirements Engineering

Abstract

Large systems maintenance efforts are often hindered because much of the history about what happened in the early stages of the systems development life cycle is lost. This knowledge, which we call the process knowledge, involving the deliberation on alternative requirements and design decisions, is lost in the course of designing and changing such systems. Extending earlier work, we present a formalism called REMAP (REpresentation and MAintenance of Process knowledge) that is geared towards capturing the rationales for design decisions and using this along with application domain specific knowledge to reason about changes in design decisions. We have developed and validated a conceptual model that relates process knowledge to the objects that are created during the requirements engineering process. This model includes as part of it the Issue Based Information System (IBIS) method which is designed to record the argumentation related to deliberations. Our model was validated using a study of problem solving behavior of individual and groups of systems analysts engaged in a simulated requirements engineering exercise. We have implemented a prototype of an environment to support the process of design and maintenance based on our model. The environment facilitates acquiring, maintaining and reasoning with various knowledge components that are used in requirements engineering tasks.

This research was supported in part by a grant from the National Science Foundation (Grant No. 8713684). Support for domain analysis was provided by the Software Technology Program of the Microelectronic Computer Technology Corporation (MCC) and Andersen Consulting. ConceptBase was provided by the ESPRIT project DAIDA.