The Role of Knowledge Management in Requirements Management

Developers of software intensive systems have problems delivering systems within cost and schedule, and many of the delivered systems do not do what users really want. Inadequate requirements engineering is a major contributor to these problems.. There are a number of reasons why the set of specified requirements is not normally equivalent to the set of ‘true’ requirements, including: natural language is imprecise; different disciplines use inconsistent terminology; conflicts are not readily recognized and therefore not properly negotiated; and assumptions are not clearly documented. Also practitioners “use different representation schemes, even within a single discipline (drawings, tables, natural language, and semi-formal models), leading to inconsistencies and ambiguities that are not likely to be discovered until the system is operational. To address these problems, classification methods and cognitive theories are discussed.