The Meaning of Requirements and Adaptation

TL;DR

This paper explores the fundamental meaning of requirements in software engineering, introduces new concepts to clarify their interpretation, critiques adaptive requirements approaches, and connects requirements modeling to established engineering theories.

Contribution

It introduces the concepts of designated set and falsifiability to clarify requirement meaning and critiques the foundational assumptions of adaptive requirements approaches.

Findings

Adaptive requirements approaches are fundamentally flawed.

Vague requirements can be characterized using new concepts.

Requirements modeling can be connected to Zave and Jackson's engineering framework.

Abstract

The traditional understanding of stakeholders requirements is that they express desirable relationships among phenomena in the relevant environment. Historically, software engineering research has tended to focus more on the problems of modeling requirements and deriving specifications given requirements, and much less on the meaning of a requirement itself. I introduce new concepts that elucidate the meaning of requirements, namely, the designated set and the falsifiability of requirements. By relying on these concepts, I (i) show that the adaptive requirements approaches, which constitute a lively and growing field in RE, are fundamentally flawed, (ii) give a sufficient characterization of vague requirements, and (iii) make the connection between requirements modeling and the Zave and Jackson sense of engineering. I support my claims with examples and an extensive discussion of the related literature. Finally, I show how adaptation can be framed in terms of Zave and Jackson's ontology.