Promoting and Supporting the Creative and Insight-Driven RE Process Using Design Rationale

Requirements Engineering (RE) is a commencing phase in the systems development life cycle. This phase is concerned with understanding and specifying the customer's requirements of the system to be delivered. Throughout the literature, this is agreed to be one of the most crucial and, unfortunately, problematic phases in systems development. This paper will offer a new approach to managing and supporting the RE process using design rationale. Requirements Engineering has been recognised as a complex cognitive problem solving process which takes place in an unstructured and poorly-understood problem context. This paper discusses characteristics of problem solving in RE, reviews common understandings of the RE process and describes a new understanding of this process resulting from an action research study. The RE process has been revealed as highly creative, involving cycles of incremental building followed by insight-driven reconceptualisation of the problem space. This new understanding will be related to various creative process models suggested in the cognitive science and psychological literature relating to problem solving. In order to support and improve problem solving in RE, various design rationale approaches have been developed/adopted to analysing the problem space and documenting the deliberations during this process. The paper reviews common design rationale approaches and argues that a common major weaknesses lies in the lack of support for the creative and insight-driven problem solving RE process. In addressing this weakness, the paper suggests a new approach to using design rationale to promote and support the inherently creative and insight-driven problem solving process in RE. The suggested approach involves a complementary approach of recording ad hoc rationale to support the creative exploration and conceptual building of the problem space; and of conducting a post hoc rationale to evaluate reconceptualisation insight. The paper describes benefits of the suggested approach and, finally, outlines future research directions.