This page intentionally left blank. FOUR DARK CORNERS OF REQUIREMENTS ENGINEERING

Research in requirements engineering has produced an extensive body of knowledge, but there are four areas in which the foundation of the discipline seems weak or obscure. This paper shines some light in the "four dark corners," exposing problems and proposing solutions. We show that all descriptions involved in requirements engineering should be descriptions of the environment. We show that certain control information is necessary to sound requirements engineering, and we explain the close association between domain knowledge and refinement of requirements. Together these conclusions explain the precise nature of requirements, specifications, and domain knowledge, as well as the precise nature of the relationships among them. They establish minimum standards for what information should be represented in a requirements language. They also make it possible to determine exactly what it means for requirements engineering to be successfully completed. ACM Copyright Notice Copyright © 1996 by the Association for Computing Machinery, Inc. Permission to make digital or hard copies of part or all of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, to republish, to post on servers, or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. FOUR DARK CORNERS OF REQUIREMENTS ENGINEERING