The missing link in requirements engineering

Abstract

Especially the early phase of requirements engineering is one of the most important and least supported parts of the software life cycle. Since pure natural language has its disadvantages, and directly arriving at a formal representation is very difficult, a link through a mediating representation is missing. We use hypertext for this purpose, providing also links among requirements statements and the representation of objects in a domain model. This possibility of explicit representation of links allows the users and analysts to make relationships and dependencies explicit and helps to be aware of them. Actually, our approach and the tool supporting it use a combination of various technologies, including also object-oriented approaches and a grain of artificial intelligence (in particular frames ). Therefore, inheritance is provided by our tool already in the early phase of requirements engineering. In particular, we found it very useful to view requirements as objects. A key idea is to support the ordering of ideas especially through classification already in the early stages. While our approach is not intended to substitute useful existing techniques emphasizing more formal representations, it can be combined with them.