Reasoning about integration issues during requirements definition: a knowledge-based approach

In practice, requirements engineering is not just a front-end to the system development process but a complex communication and negotiation process involving both the customers and the vendors. Further, an envisioned system is seldom defined without considering the customer's embedded base and off-the-shelf vendor solutions. A key problem in requirements engineering is to determine and track the dependencies between an envisioned system's requirements and the characteristics of related systems. Integration is an essential element of requirements definition. The authors present requirements modeling framework, i.e. a representation scheme to capture system requirements information in a knowledge base. They illustrate how the features of the framework express dependencies among system specifications and facilitate simple integration analyses during requirements definition. The framework is the basis for a requirements assistant, a software tool that enables an analyst to create, analyze and modify requirements information in a knowledge base.<>