Pi-Hwa Sun, S.B. Russ, Y.C. Chen and W.M. Beynon, Cultivating Requirements in a Situated Requirements Engineering Process (May 1, 1357).
The fact that requirements are situated motivates an alternative to conventional process models that gives adequate recognition to the situatedness of the requirements engineering process (REP). This paper proposes a problem-oriented framework SPORE (situated process of requirements engineering) whereby requirements as solutions to the identified problems in the application domain are developed in an open-ended and situated manner. Within this framework, people participating in the REP are able to cultivate requirements through collaborative interaction with each other for solving the identified problems, rather than to search for requirements from the jungle of users' needs. For a given application, a family of artefacts or interactive situation models (ISM) are developed which form the medium for the problem-solving process of requirements cultivation. These ISMs are built using the principles and tools of the Empirical Modelling, a novel approach to computer-based modelling. Participants can create and use these models not only as artefacts to explore, expand and experience the solutions to the identified problems, but also as a powerful means of supporting their collaborative interaction for 'growing up' the solutions in a distributed environment. A case study of applying this framework to cultivate requirements for a warehouse distribution system is given.