Supporting the acquisition and modeling of requirements in software design

This paper describes a system for supporting the construction of software requirement models, which are initial computable models representing users' requirements in software design. The system principally consists of two components, a system for aiding the formation of requirement concepts by visualizing a user's thought space, and a knowledge-based system which automatically assembles the ascertained requirement concepts into a requirement model. The system extracts reusable components of a requirement model, corresponding to the users' abstract requirement concept, from a store of similar past cases. The components are then automatically arranged using heuristic reasoning. By using the system, users can make their requirement concepts more mature, and simultaneously get computable requirement models as by-products.