A knowledge-based approach to requirements analysis

In software engineering, requirements analysis is a knowledge intensive task: and it requires an expert to understand what the clients need. We introduce a method which contains different AI techniques to perform this task, and a knowledge-based requirements analysis system, RAKES is presented to explain our approach. With RAKES, not only the ordinary functional requirements are collected, but also the non-traditional information. Nonfunctional requirements include the quality of operations or the background information for constructing the requirements which are gathered through a knowledge-based support. Different kinds of information collected are stored and organized in a knowledge base and can be used as the source of the user input in the latter phases of software development. Algorithms and procedures have been developed for constructing the interface language, organizing the knowledge base, and applying the knowledge base to different tasks. RAKES is integrated to the FRORL architecture to offer a systematic way toward requirements analysis, specification production, prototype generation, specification debugging, and code transformation