Requirements trawling: techniques for discovering requirements

ion The technique of abstraction is based on making useful generalisations. The purpose of the generalisations is to understand and articulate the rules that apply to a specific domain of knowledge and even to discover rules that are shared between domains. Many people find it very difficult to think in terms of abstractions and are much more comfortable thinking in terms of specific instances. For instance, suppose someone says “If I press this button on the top of my camera then it takes a photo”. A more abstract view might be “all devices that take photographs have some way to set in motion the taking of a photograph”. People who are good at abstract thinking are usually comfortable looking at class models, data models and other models that focus on the “essence” [McMenamin &Palmer ’84, Robertson & Robertson ‘94] of the subject matter.