Using Stakeholders, Domain Knowledge, and Responsibilities to Specify Information Systems' Requirements

Abstract

The most crucial aspect of information systems (IS) engineering is the gathering and validating of requirements. Requirements can be seen as coming from 1 of 2 domains: the technical and the social. Consequently, 1 of the questions currently facing IS engineering is: How do you capture and validate requirements from the social domain? In an attempt to answer this question, researchers have started to examine the role that stakeholders and domain knowledge play in IS development. The belief is that the best source of requirements is domain knowledge, and the best source of domain knowledge is stakeholders. Current requirements engineering methods, which are being used in industry, are failing to adequately identify stakeholders and their associated requirements. In an attempt to address this issue, the responsibility modeling technique developed in this article focuses on the specification of requirements and domain knowledge through the identification of stakeholders and the specification of the roles they play and the actions they perform within an organization.