Monitoring Our Requirements

Most people think of requirements as things to manipulate at the start of a project. Others, more enlightened, recognize that requirements also have a role toward the end of projects to test compliance. But few people have recognized an active role for requirements during their system´s use - to monitor whether the system continues to comply with its requirements during its lifetime. This important new role for requirements - which necessitates the specification of software monitors to test for requirements compliance - has implications for how such requirements are structured and exposed, especially for the increasing numbers of software-based systems that use monitors to adapt to their environments.