The role of domain knowledge representation in requirements elicitation
Akira Osada, Daigo Ozawa, Haruhiko Kaiya, Kenji Kaijiri · 2007
An information system is embedded in a specific business or activities in an organization, thus, the knowledge about such a business and an organization, that is domain knowl-edge, is crucially important in a requirements analysis for such a system. Therefore, the effective and efficient us-age of domain knowledge is very important in requirements analysis. In order to use domain knowledge documents ef-fectively and efficiently, not only the contents but also the representation is important. In this paper, we report the experimental results about the effect of two different repre-sentations during requirements analysis. We designed four metrics that measure the effect of the requirements spec-ification. By using the metrics, we did comparative ex-periments that evaluate the effect of the representations on the quality of requirements documents. We analyzed two requirements documents each of which is constructed by using different domain knowledge representations: one is dictionary style and the other is UML style. As a result, dictionary style seemed to be adequate for the comprehen-sive description and UML style seemed to be adequate for the as-is reuse of the domain knowledge.