KMoS-RE: knowledge management on a strategy to requirements engineering

Abstract

This paper introduces the KMoS-RE Strategy, a novel requirements engineering strategy to Informal Structured Domains. Requirements engineering aims to elicit, analyze, evaluate, consolidate, and manage the requirements of a software system. The complexity of this process depends on the application domain. In Informal Structured Domains, not all concepts and their relations are formally defined, most of the problems do not have algorithms to obtain solutions, and the domain specialists use large amounts of tacit knowledge to solve problems. These characteristics generate ambiguous, inappropriate, and incomplete requirements. It could generate an inadequate software solution, or it could be the cause of increasing the project development time. Therefore, it is important to use an appropriate requirements engineering strategy to minimize these problems. The objective of this study is to present the Knowledge Management on a Strategy to Requirements Engineering (KMoS-RE Strategy): a novel requirements engineering strategy oriented to the transformation and transference of knowledge, and with the aim to minimize the percentage of ambiguous, incomplete, and inappropriate requirements. The functionality and utility of the strategy is explained through its application to a real case study. The case study shows that using the KMoS-RE Strategy helps to internalize the domain knowledge, to clarify the solution idea, to reduce the ignorance of symmetry, to structure the domain knowledge, and to detect and correct wrong beliefs about the domain. All of these are performed in the early stage of the project development.