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