A METHOD FOR REQUIREMENTS ANALYSIS AND KNOWLEDGE ELICITATION

Abstract

Requirements analysis is a knowledge intensive task and it requires an expert to understand what the clients need. In this paper, we introduce a method which contains different artificial intelligence techniques to perform this task, and a prototype knowledge-based requirements analysis system, RAKES, is presented to explain our approach. In this approach, not only the ordinary functional requirements are collected, but also some non-traditional information, such as non-functional requirements like the quality of operations or the background information for constructing the requirements, is gathered through a knowledge-based support. Different kinds of information collected are stored and organized in a knowledge base and can be used as the source of the user input in the latter phases of software development. Algorithms and procedures have been developed for constructing the interface language, organizing the knowledge base, and applying the knowledge base to different tasks. RAKES is integrated to an on-going research, called the FRORL methodology, to offer a systematic way toward requirements analysis, specification production, prototype generation, specification debugging, and code transformation.