Rationale management challenges in requirements engineering

Abstract

Abstract-Rationale and rationale management have been playing an increasingly prominent role in software system development mainly due to the knowledge demand during system evaluation, maintenance, and evolution, especially for large and complex systems. The rationale management for requirements engineering, as a commencing and critical phase in software development life cycle, is still under-exploited. In this paper, we first survey briefly the state-of-the-art on rationale employment and applications in requirements engineering. Secondly, we identify the challenges in integrating rationale management in requirements engineering activities in order to promote further investigations and define a research agenda on rationale management in requirements engineering.

The Impact of Visualizing Traceability Links for Evolving Requirements in Software Maintenance– A Controlled Experiment

“…Zahra et al conducted a requirements engineering visualization literature review and found that requirements evolution is having the least visualization support [13]. Requirement management tools support visualization of requirements however the important limitation is that these visualizations do not show the relationship between requirements [14].…”

“…The visualization of such evolving requirements and their relationships were also not considered by researchers who focussed on visualizing trace links [14,17,18].…”

Extended Rationale-Based Model for Tacit Knowledge Elicitation in Requirements Elicitation Context

“…Requirements rationale knowledge management is beneficial but also costly, and considerable resources, time, and effort are required before benefits [17]. However, in other side capturing tacit knowledge in the form of a requirements rationale is expected to be useful in many cases, such as providing greater help in understanding the complexity of the software application, for maintenance, for future evolution of the software, to assess changes and to predict possible changes [13], [18]- [20].People who involved in maintenance or change requirements activities can use the documentation produced by the rationale model to avoid spending time reconsidering decisions that have been previously considered [21].Furthermore, a rationale can help in reuse when similar issues occur and aids in the next project succeed [17]. Rationale reuse improves, reducing effort and decision time by avoiding several repetitive tasks [20].…”