Facilitating tacit-knowledge acquisition within requirements engineering

摘要

Software maintenance represents one of the most challenging tasks for software engineers. This can be attributed to many problems related to how software applications are built. However, the lack of enough historical knowledge about legacy software projects is a major software maintenance issue. Though software documentation is heavily used to guide maintainers tasks, but it only cater for documented experience knowledge in the form of diagrams, code, test cases, etc. On the other hand valuable experience knowledge can not be recalled simply because it is implicitly embedded in the minds of expert software engineers. This includes views, assumptions, and observations made as part of managing legacy software projects. The lack of such valuable experience knowledge during software maintenance would certainly lead to misinterpretations and wrong assumptions about the software being maintained. Within the software lifecycle, software requirements phase accommodates extensive expert deliberations. This represents a major source of software tacit or undocumented knowledge. Capturing tacit knowledge in the form of requirements rationale is expected to provide greater help for software maintainers to understand the complexity of the software application being maintained. This paper presents an approach for capturing experts' tacit knowledge. It is aimed to provide the ability to capture requirements tacit knowledge resulted from the collaborative requirements verification and validation.