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Revisiting the Meaning of Requirements

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Abstract

Understanding the meaning of requirements can help elicit the real world requirements and refine their specifications. But what do the requirements of a desired software mean is not a well-explained question yet though there are many software development methods available. This paper suggests that the meaning of requirements could be depicted by the will-to-be environments of the desired software, and the optative interactions of the software with its environments as well as the causal relationships among these interactions. This paper also emphasizes the necessity of distinguishing the external manifestation from the internal structure of each system component during the process of requirements decomposition and refinement. Several decomposition strategies have been given to support the continuous decomposition. The external manifestation and the internal structure of the system component have been defined. The roles of the knowledge about the environments have been explicitly described. A simple but meaningful example embedded in the paper illustrates the main ideas as well as how to conduct the requirements decomposition and refinement by using these proposed strategies.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Academy of Mathematics and System Science, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, 100080, P.R. China

    Zhi Jin

  2. Institute of Computing Technology, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, 100080, P.R. China

    Zhi Jin

Authors
  1. Zhi Jin
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Zhi Jin.

Additional information

Supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (Grant Nos. 60233010 and 60496324), the National Basic Research 973 Program of China (Grant No. 2002CB312004), the Knowledge Innovation Program of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, MADIS of the Chinese Academy of Sciences.

Zhi Jin received the B.S. degree in computer science from Zhejiang University in 1984, and studied for her M.S. degree in computer science (expert system) and her Ph.D. degree in computer science (artificial intelligence) at National Defence University of Technology. She received the Ph.D. degree in 1992. She is a senior member of China Computer Federation. Her research interests include knowledge-based systems, artificial intelligence, requirements engineering, ontology engineering, etc. Her current research focuses on ontology-based requirements elicitation and analysis. She has published about 60 publications, including one co-authoring book.

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Jin, Z. Revisiting the Meaning of Requirements. J Comput Sci Technol 21, 32–40 (2006). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11390-006-0032-x

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11390-006-0032-x

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