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Requirements Abstraction Model

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Abstract

Software requirements arrive in different shapes and forms to development organizations. This is particularly the case in market-driven requirements engineering, where the requirements are on products rather than directed towards projects. This results in challenges related to making different requirements comparable. In particular, this situation was identified in a collaborative effort between academia and industry. A model, with four abstraction levels, was developed as a response to the industrial need. The model allows for placement of requirements on different levels and supports abstraction or break down of requirements to make them comparable to each other. The model was successfully validated in several steps at a company. The results from the industrial validation point to the usefulness of the model. The model will allow companies to ensure comparability between requirements, and hence it generates important input to activities such as prioritization and packaging of requirements before launching a development project.

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Notes

  1. The improvement issues “issue-id” have been altered from their original state for reasons of simplification. Title and description in Table 1 are unaltered.

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Acknowledgements

The work and results presented in this article were done and produced in close and fruitful cooperation between research and industry. The authors would like to thank everyone involved during the SPI work at DHR and especially the members of the SPI work team for their commitment and tireless work.

This work was partly funded by The Knowledge Foundation in Sweden under a research grant for the project “Blekinge—Engineering Software Qualities (BESQ)” (http://www.ipd.bth.se/besq).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. School of Engineering, Blekinge Institute of Technology, PO Box 520, 372 25, Ronneby, Sweden

    Tony Gorschek & Claes Wohlin

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  1. Tony Gorschek
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  2. Claes Wohlin
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Correspondence to Tony Gorschek.

Appendix

Appendix

Fig. 9
figure 9

RAM how-to guide part I: initial placement of requirements

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figure 10

RAM how-to guide part II: abstraction and breakdown of requirement

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Gorschek, T., Wohlin, C. Requirements Abstraction Model. Requirements Eng 11, 79–101 (2006). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00766-005-0020-7

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