iRE: A Semantic Network based Interactive Requirements Engineering Framework

Requirements engineering (RE) involves processing informal natural language descriptions of system requirements into an integrated and structured formal specification. The traditional RE process is ad-hoc, laborious, time-consuming, and error-prone manual process. For large-scale software intensive systems, the RE process becomes very difficult to manage. It is further complicated by ill-defined, incomplete, and redundantly specified requirements. To streamline the process, an end-to-end seamless RE framework is therefore needed. In this paper, we present an overview of an end-to-end semi-automated change-tolerant interactive requirements engineering (iRE) framework. It keeps and maintains the meta-level information of the interrelated requirements models into a semantic network model (SNM), and provides a method and processing system to derive an integrated and structured model. The iRE involves the requirements analysts in an interactive fashion during the modeling process.