Requirements We Live By

Abstract

Enlightened requirements engineering (RE) researchers and practitioners generally accept that RE is as much about understanding the world as it is about understanding the software and systems that will be built to inhabit that world. As a result, the RE field has fostered a multi-disciplinary following of researchers and practitioners who are prepared to engage deeply in application domains, to apply a range of technical and socio-technical skills to understand those domains, and to accept that the outcome of an effective RE process may not deliver a software system at all. The RE community has also developed, deployed, and evaluated a wide range of contributions that reflect such enlightenment: conceptual models that reflect the relationships between the world and the machine, domain models and scenarios that reflect understandings of problem domains, and enterprise models that reflect the organisations and processes that build and deploy systems. All these in addition to the models that capture the all-important behaviour of systems and software. It seems to me however that the RE discipline is at a crossroads. The mechanics of the discipline appear to be established – much of the published research is now empirical – or technical, but only in so far as it responds to technological advances elsewhere, such as mobile and ubiquitous technologies represented by the Internet of Things, richer application domains such as Industrie 4.0 and Smart Cities, or more advanced computational techniques that are maturing, such AI, machine learning, and blockchains. As a community, we reassure ourselves that our discipline is safe and thriving, after all RE is a “forever problem”: all systems we wish to build will have requirements, now and forever. But this is to be complacent. RE has no protected status to study and deploy requirements. The formal models we elicit, design, and build are increasingly deployable by other disciplines, as are the values that we seek our modern, AI-driven systems to embody. A new and potentially radical re-framing of our discipline may be needed, and I will speculate what this may look like. It may require letting go of what we have considered to be the boundaries of our discipline, while embracing new but fluid boundaries. I have advocated and explored “software without boundaries” as one such framing that challenges the separation of ‘world and the machine’, not because I don't accept the separation of the ‘what’ and the ‘how’, the ‘indicative’ and the ‘optative’, or the ‘problem’ and the ‘solution’, but because the world we live in no longer accepts these separations. Society, more often than not, does not think of systems, of technology, or indeed of software; it thinks of ways of working, ways of interacting, ways of living. Requirements, such as they are, are ‘requirements we live by’ not requirements of systems in the world. At an extreme, if one believes the AI hype, ‘the world and the machine’ will increasingly be replaced by the ‘world in the machine’. Where does the RE community stand on this, and what can this community do to contribute to the framing and solving of this new reality? My own work in recent years has evolved to reflect the above. I still revisit, with some pride, the ‘RE Roadmap’ that Steve Easterbrook and I published in 2000 – many of the fundamental RE principles we presented still hold today. But I cringe at how we missed the changing nature of the world in which we operate: a world populated by autonomous and adaptive systems, populated by big data and associated analytics, and populated by stakeholders whose multiple perspectives reflect a multitude of ethical and social values, not all of which are wholesome, and many of which are actively subversive or malicious. My own research on security and privacy requirements only scratches the surface of this evolving reality. I invite the RE community to reflect on how it frames its own research in this context.