Tool-Guided, Domain-Specific, Systematic Requirements Management

The importance of the quality of requirements for successful execution and completion of a project from a technical and contractual point of view is being recognized more and more. Many methods are targeted to improve the support for collecting requirements while still focusing on natural language. However, the ambiguities in the semantics of natural language are the biggest obstacles towards success. The approach presented in this paper focuses on the elements of a domain while keeping the expressiveness of natural names and terms and introducing clear semantics. This brings the advantage that immediate verification of the human-provided inputs is possible, immediate contributions to validation are available and inconsistencies can be detected by a tool immediately. This leads to guidance of an engineer by a tool towards consistent, complete and correct requirements - requirements of high quality - and eases maintenance for the same reasons. As most of the complexity is handled by the tool due to its good knowledge on the domain, the approach is scalable towards large specifications. Several examples of application domains are described which illustrate the universality and feasibility of the approach across domain boundaries.