Erroneous requirements: a linguistic basis for their occurrence and an approach to their reduction

Poor communication of domain knowledge is implicated as a major threat to the validity of a requirements specification. It is hypothesized that careful examination of the mechanisms used for this communication can yield insight to motivate a response. We recognize that natural language is amenable to rigorous inspection and look to research results in linguistics to illuminate the nature of communicative breakdowns. From a better understanding of these breakdowns, we develop an approach, called the domain map, that through its structure and the process of its creation shows potential to aid in the systematic reduction of the incidence of communicative breakdowns during requirements. Essential domain semantics are better preserved in the conceptual model of the developers and thus the threat to validity of the model is reduced. Tool support enabling the creation and analysis of domain maps is also described.