The role of digital world, information and knowledge in organizations has become increasingly important. Fast changing information systems and requirements ask for fast reactions and rich knowledge about existing solutions. Today's technological development provides new possibilities and new tools that support everyday processes and knowledge management. For example requirements management tools now include even support in collecting knowledge and bring new trends in requirements communication. In this paper the author will provide insight in knowledge management approaches which can support requirement management process and improve knowledge availability, for example, the requirements realization process and the use of requirements results.
The role of digital world, information and knowledge in organizations has become increasingly important. Fast changing information systems (IS) and requirements ask for fast reactions and rich knowledge about existing solutions. And in case of continuous requirement engineering (CRE), rich knowledge and availability of information (including requirements) becomes increasingly important.
Digitalization brings us more and more possibilities to manage existing data,
knowledge and processes. One of the possibilities is socialization. Even in formal
environment socialization tools can help collecting knowledge and making decisions
and documenting them. Today there are attempts to implement some socialization
functionality in existing requirements management tools. For example JIRA [
In the previous paper author describes [
This paper contains 5 sections: section 1 – introduction, section 2 – related work about CRE and KM, section 3 – Requirements management approach, section 4 – conclusion and section 5 – bibliography. 2
Requirements engineering (RE) concerns such IS life cycle activities as requirements
elicitation, requirements analysis, requirements management and other requirements
management activities [
Information, data and knowledge is most useful only in situations when it is put to
use. CRE concept concerns continuous work on requirements and solutions.
Continuous work means reuse of existing requirements and improvement of them in the
context of IS changes. The term of CRE [6, 12 is not widely described in research. But
some concepts of continuity are already described, for example in SWEBOK
(Software Engineering Body of Knowledge) [
BABOK (Business Analysis Body of Knowledge) 3 [
There are some more specific topics too, e.g. model (Model Federation) for CRE to
support and propose an approach of model federation that allows information sharing
by maintaining dynamic links between different models [
Knowledge creation, capturing and diffusion have become important aspects in
organizations [
Ruhaya Ab. Aziza, Bernard Wongb [
We can talk about knowledge only if we have gathered some knowledge. And last
year there was some research done on usage of today’s social messaging (SM) tools
in enterprises [
Social messaging [
In [
There are some studies about challenges in Requirement Engineering: S. Besrour,
L. Bin AB Rahim and P.D.D. Dominic describe such challenges as poor
communication during requirement elicitation, undocumented relations among requirements and
stakeholders, requirements inconsistency and others [
Requirements engineering is strongly related to communication and knowledge. Today’s tools for RE and software development support include some option for socialization (online communication, discussions, sharing etc.). 3
This section of the paper describes the model of approach of managing requirements in a way that involves socialization possibilities with the purpose to provide knowledge and requirements.
Nowadays the biggest focus in IS projects is mostly put on fast product delivery but there are no assumptions on future work with requirements. If we lack an effective approach for requirements management and distribution, this can result in incomplete requirements, outdated requirement versions and missing information and knowledge.
Many approaches and possibilities in knowledge management and distribution are
described in literature. For example requirement distribution can be equivalent to
knowledge management, because it includes a whole set of methods for knowledge
distribution [
Author proposes an approach describing the key principle that can help make requirements distribution more effective and even make requirements management simpler. This approach in early stage havs been adapted in a real company. The validation of results will be shown in next research papers. , n tsen lisyaan ilccanoo .tce
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RE knowledge management Requirements versioning
Support for IS development process Requirements detalization and traceability
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I Figure 1 Model of requirements management approach
The basic idea of the approach is: by reducing the number of requirements management tools and channels we can reduce resources (time resources) for requirement management and simplify communication management (communication mostly is organized trough the tool and all communication is documented). This includes the knowledge elicitation and management activities by using tool support for communication and socialization.
This simple idea can be shown as a model of requirement management approach (see Figure 1).
Shown model of requirements management approach illustrates the key concept – less tools, multi-functional options for communication and socialization, traceability, search, accessibility possibilities, versioning and traceability support, developments process support and other functionality.
If we make a mathematical comparison: for example, 2 organizations, each of which have 2 tools for requirements input. We can assume that the requirements input in each tool requires the same time – X. Then the cumulative time = number of tools*2*X. When the number of tools is minimized, it reduces the total time spent on requirements input. It can save an hour a day or even more.
The next aspect is time that the involved persons spend on search in documented communication process and linking to requirements. If we assume that most of communication and socialization activities are fixed among requirements, it can save us time for searching in different sources and linking them. Of course, the effectiveness depends on quality of the written communication.
This model of RM approach brings restrictions or rules such as the need to ensure of the use of tool from all involved persons and the need to provide availability of tools to all involved persons.
As a result of such approach we can gain more data and knowledge related to requirements. Figure 2 shows the illustrated requirements relations to socialization results.
Requirements usually are stored in “requirements register” – it can be in MS Word, MS Excel or other type of system. And usually contains requirements and their attributes like author, priority, number, date of requirements capture, status etc. Socialization possibilities can bring a new way of requirements management.
Socialization means that requirements have a new attribute – comments, questions and answers, documented decision process. This information can be transformed into knowledge – knowledge about real business processes related to a certain requirement, knowledge about real use of functionality which includes a particular requirement, knowledge about requirements elicitation history and process, and other information. In this case in Figure 2 we can see that this approach links several aspects starting from requirement to socialization results and even knowledge.
Likewise, this model of RM approach shows that we need to think about the relation of requirements to aspects like knowledge and documented communication. The efficiency of this approach will be tested in a real organization and the result of these tests will be described in the following research papers. 4
Mostly IS development projects involve more than one project team and persons. If that is the case, challenges in requirement management and distribution are unavoidable because in most cases each project team uses their own tool and communication channel.
Requirements management and distribution needs to be smart and sustainable, and that means we need to think about the ways of requirement storage and the convenience of their use, and of course – whether the requirements distribution is timely organized. It is critical if a need arises to use these requirements during all of the IS life cycle.
Proposed approach points out the need for small amount of requirement management tools and sets rules for effective requirements management and communication, e.g. – all involved persons use the selected tool (tools) and all tools contain the same version of requirements.