Representation and management of requirements: The RAPID-WS project

supporting methodologies to improve requirements determination and analysis in a concurrent collaborative environment In this paper, we concentrate on our approach to the semi-formal representation and capture of requirements We avoid common assumptions that restrict the subject domain to information processing systems We also attempt to build a representation that does not force the requirements analyst to do anything that looks like programming in a formal language We see a requirements document as a set of constraints imposed on the attributes and relations (properties) of domain entities relevant to the subject artifact throughout the artifact’s lifecycle While earlier research deals only with attribute requirements and views relations as specified a priori, we define both relations and attributes only via requirements We found that requirements specified in typical requirements documents can be classified into a relatively small set of formal types and modal-ities Requirements can be decomposed into simple requirement statements, and most of the simple requirement statements have the same gen-eralized structure Based on these findings, we propose a frame-based Requirements Specification Language (RSL) which is semi-formal in the sense that it con-tains elements (textual descriptions) which require human interpretation Key Words: requirements engineering, document management, knowledge representation, formal specification, system design, frame-based language 1. Motivation for the Researc