The case for cooperative requirement writing

Abstract

Ensuring high quality in requirements is difficult and costly, and often requires extensive study on the part of the requirement engineer (RE) of the applicative domain. An interesting alternative to the traditional approach is the adoption of a cooperative requirement writing (CRW) process. In CRW processes, several stakeholders, both technical and non-technical, are directly involved in drafting the requirements for a system. Each participant can then contribute his or her own competences without the need for costly knowledge transfer activities. Due to the different backgrounds of the various stakeholders, CRW processes need good support from appropriate automatic tools to be effective. In this paper, we sketch the needs of CRWprocesses and describe Circe, a Web-based CRW environment targeted mainly at supporting cooperation on natural-language requirements.