An Exception Handling Approach to Enhancing Consistency, Completeness, and Correctness in Collaborative Requirements Capture
Mark Klein · Concurrent Engineering · 1997
This paper describes C-ReCS, a WWW-based system for collaborative requirements capture that uses a generic knowledge-based approach to detecting and resolving the "exceptions" (i.e. different kinds of inconsistency, incompleteness and incorrectness) that can arise frequently in such settings. 1 The Challenge The current DoD requirements definition process typically consists of multiple iterations of increasingly broader reviews, centered around an action officer, with flow times of 400 days or even more. The process thus operates like traditional "throw over the wall" manufacturing, where one function completes its job and only then sends it to the next function for review, with all the attendant problems of excessive iteration and rework, communication delays, misunderstandings between different functions and limited concurrency. While details differ, this kind of serial requirements definition process is also characteristic of much of industry. Concurrent engineering ideas, which hav...