In Requirements Engineering, requirements elicitation aims the acquisition of information from the stakeholders of a system-to-be. An important task during elicitation is to identify and render explicit the stakeholders' implicit assumptions about the system-to-be and its environment. Purpose of doing so is to identify omissions in, and conflicts between requirements. This paper o?ers a conceptual framework for the identi?cation and documentation of default requirements that stakeholders may be using. The framework is relevant for practice, as it forms a check-list for types of questions to use during elicitation. An empirical validation is described, and guidelines for elicitation are drawn.
In their seminal paper on the four dark corners of RE, Zave and Jackson established a core ontology for RE, which describes the important concepts to be accounted for in RE @cite_16 . Doing so, they suggest that information about domain assumptions, requirements and specifications of the system-to-be must be collected, documented and analysed in order for RE to be successful. broaden this ontology by suggesting that any communicated information is relevant to consider as part of requirements problem @cite_14 . In other words, any information that is explicitely adressed to the engineer is relevant to consider . The present paper argues that both explicit implicit information are relevant to consider.
@cite_14 @cite_16
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In their seminal paper ACM T. Softw. Eng. Methodol., 61 1997, 1--30, Zave and Jackson established a core ontology for Requirements Engineering RE and used it to formulate the “requirements problem”, thereby defining what it means to successfully complete RE. Starting from the premise that the stakeholders of the system-to-be communicate to the software engineer the information needed to perform RE, Zave and Jackson's ontology is shown to be incomplete, in that it does not cover all classes of basic concerns --namely, the beliefs, desires, intentions, and evaluations --that the stakeholders communicate. In response, we provide a new core ontology for requirements that covers these classes of basic stakeholder concerns. The proposed new core ontology leads to a new formulation of the requirements problem. We thereby establish a new framework for the information that needs to be elicited over the course of RE and new criteria for determining whether an RE problem has been successfully addressed. Research in requirements engineering has produced an extensive body of knowledge, but there are four areas in which the foundation of the discipline seems weak or obscure. This article shines some light in the “four dark corners,” exposing problems and proposing solutions. We show that all descriptions involved in requirements engineering should be descriptions of the environment. We show that certain control information is necessary for sound requirements engineering, and we explain the close association between domain knowledge and refinement of requirements. Together these conclusions explain the precise nature of requirements, specifications, and domain knowledge, as well as the precise nature of the relationships among them. They establish minimum standards for what information should be represented in a requirements language. They also make it possible to determine exactly what it means for requirements and engineering to be successfully completed.