iRE: An Interactive Requirements Engineering Framework
Kushal Ahmed · Griffith Research Online · 2016
Requirements Engineering (RE) involves processing informal natural language de-scriptions of the system requirements into an integrated and structured formal specification. Current and future software intensive systems must accommodate increasingly larger sets of requirements. Therefore, in large-scale new systems engi- neering projects, the requirements analyst (RA) may end up with many thousands, sometimes tens or even hundreds of thousands, of requirements. Dealing with these large volume of requirements is extremely challenging for several reasons: 1. The system requirements may be unstructured and loosely distributed. 2. They may be ill-defined, incomplete, or redundantly specified. 3. They may change at any time, having ripple effects on others. As a result, the RE process becomes very difficult to manage for a large-scale software intensive system, even if it is somewhat manageable for a small-scale one. In order to streamline the RE process, we present an interactive requirements engineering (iRE) framework. The iRE framework provides automated supports for (1) defects detection and resolution, (2) change management and (3) derivation of integrated and structured system model. Since domain knowledge is necessary in different scenarios, the framework involves the RA in an interactive fashion.