Scenarios, in most situations, are descriptions of required interactions between a desired system and its environment which detail normative system behaviour. There is considerable current interest in the use of scenarios for acquisition, elaboration and validation of system requirements. However, despite this interest, there remains a lack of methods and software tools to generate and use scen...

Successful development of software systems requires a set of complete, consistent and clear requirements. A wide range of different stakeholders with various needs and backgrounds participate in the requirements engineering process. Accordingly, it is difficult to completely satisfy the requirements of each and every stakeholder. It is the requirements engineer’s job to trade-off stakeholders’ ...

Requirements elicitation is the first activity in the requirements engineering process. It includes learning, surfacing and discovering the requirements of the stakeholders of the developed system. The elicitation process involves actors of different roles, backgrounds and domain knowledge. Therefore, it is a communication-intensive process. Overcoming communication barriers between analysts an...

The requirements engineering discipline has become more and more important in the last years. Tasks such as the requirements elicitation, the specification of requirements or the requirements validation are essential to assure the quality of the resulting software. The development of Web systems usually involves more heterogeneous stakeholders than the construction of traditional software. In a...

This paper addresses the problem of ‘production-quality’ CSCW software development where software is developed from an agreed statement of the system requirements. In particular, we are concerned with ways in which requirements specifications for CSCW systems can be developed and with the integration of ethnography into traditional specification methods. Existing approaches to requirements engi...

Requirements analysis constitutes a critical phase in the development of software systems, and for Web sites it can often be a determining factor in the success of the company or organisation. A thorough requirements elicitation will take into considerations the objectives and needs of all the actors involved. It is therefore important for an analyst to have conceptual instruments that support ...

This article presents a tool that has been developed for the creation of multiple views of system requirements specification. The key component for developing the tool is a metamodel that enables to represent the different views, each one based on a particular method and technique. The primary benefits of the tool include: using two or more techniques in a system’s specification; translating re...

Conceptual modelling is situated in the broader view of information systems requirements engineering. Requirements Engineering (RE) explores the objectives of different stakeholders and the activities carried out by them to meet these objectives in order to derive purposeful system requirements and therefore lead to better quality systems i.e. systems that meet the requirements of their users. ...

This paper presents the results of case studies evaluating our method of unifying use cases (UCs) to derive a unified statechart (SC) model of the behavior of the domain system (DS) of a proposed computer-based system. An evaluation of the unification method, the obtained SC model of the DS, the method’s and model’s feedback on the UCs themselves, and how the method is used in requirements engi...

More than 3⁄4 of large software projects suffer large cost and schedule overruns or fail outright. Deficits in project requirements cause more than half of these failures and overruns. This is in part because the establishing of software requirements is fraught with complexity. Finding ways to manage that complexity might be an important step in reducing the risk of software development. Group ...