Using pre-requirements tracing to investigate requirements based on tactic knowledge

Pre-requirements specification tracing concerns the identification and maintenance of relationships between requirements and the knowledge and information used by analysts to inform the requirements’ formulation. However, such tracing is often not performed as it is a time-consuming process. This paper presents a tool for retrospectively identifying pre-requirements traces by working backwards from requirements to the documented records of the elicitation process such as interview transcripts or ethnographic reports. We present a preliminary evaluation of our tools performance using a case study. One of the key goals of our work is to identify requirements that have weak relationships with the source material. There are many possible reasons for this, but one is that they embody tacit knowledge. Although we do not investigate the nature of tacit knowledge in RE we believe that even helping to identify the probable presence of tacit knowledge is useful. This is particularly true for circumstances when requirements’ sources need to be understood during, for example, the handling of change requests.