On the applicability of requirements determination methods

In this thesis we have studied the field of requirements determination for enterprise information systems. We discovered that in the ERP era that characterizes the information systems in many (large) enterprises at the beginning of the 21st century, the issue of requirements determination is still relevant. We also discovered that the ‘stateof-the-art’ of this field still shows a number of omissions in the definition of requirements specifications modeling constructs and methodology. We have chosen to specify ‘the requirements’ or demands for a requirements method itself using four (groups of) criteria. These criteria were operationalized by studying the three most dominant requirements determination approaches that exist today. These criteria were subsequently translated into 19 specific demands (RMD’s) for a to be designed requirements determination method. In the second part of this thesis (chapters 5 and 6) we have introduced the Natural Language Modeling (NLM) approach for requirements determination. It turns out that NLM satisfices all 19 requirements and therefore can be considered an appropriate design alternative, as is specified in the design research cycle (Van Engelen and Van der Zwaan, 1994). Hence the choice of Natural Language Modeling as answer for our research objective is justified.