Requirements interaction management (RIM) is the set of activities directed toward the discovery, management, and disposition of critical relationships among sets of requirements, which has become a critical area of requirements engineering. This survey looks at the evolution of supporting concepts and their related literature, presents an issues-based framework for reviewing processes and products, and applies the framework in a review of RIM state-of-the-art. Finally, it presents seven research projects that exemplify this emerging discipline.
Managing software requirements during their development can be a complex and difficult task. The requirements can be voluminous, complex, and changing. The analysts, who develop the requirements, can be numerous and changing. Determining the current state of requirements in such a dynamic development environment is challenging. We present techniques to manage requirements in such a dynamic environment.We define requirements management techniques which uncover, manage, and restructure requirements inconsistencies. Aspects of these techniques have been automated within a multi-user World Wide Web environment, called DEALSCRIBE. The techniques, and their support within DEALSCRIBE, are methodology neutral; they simply assume that requirements development is composed of discrete events and products which can be monitored. Requirements development is then managed by specifying development goals, monitoring for their failure, and applying corrective actions when the goals are not met.To support requirements inconsistency management, we have defined requirements consistency goals which are monitored using our requirements management techniques. To validate the utility of the approach, we have applied the basic techniques in several case studies. Additionally, we have conducted a new case study using the support of DEALSCRIBE. We draw qualitative conclusions from these case studies that: 1) the general approach of managing requirements development through monitoring development goals helps an analyst gain a clearer understand of the requirements state and helps to focus development; and 2) the techniques specific to uncovering, controlling, and restructuring requirements inconsistencies can reduce an analyst's effort.Index Terms-Requirements engineering, inconsistency and conflict management, process modeling and monitoring, meta-modeling, requirements tools.
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