From: Andrew Gabb (agabb@tpgi.com.au)
Date: Thu Jun 03 2004 - 13:00:44 EST
Donald Firesmith wrote:
> Thus, the real problem to effective RE is getting what we already know into
> wide-spread practice, and no amount of research into new RE techniques is
> likely to have any significant impact on solving that problem because the
> problem is not technical but rather psychological, socialogical, political,
> etc.
I strongly agree. But I also feel that much RE research is useful, or will be useful some day. It just has little immediate effect on the overall lack of adequate RE out there, and in some cases may be having a negative effect.
'Natural language' RE is not responsible for the bulk of the problems we see throughout the world. Many (perhaps the majority of) very successful projects have used natural languages to express their needs, with very little risk IMNSHO. The main problems are in deciding what requirements and needed and discovering them, not in their representation. If your requirements are wrong or incomplete, they are probably going to stay wrong and incomplete. Non-NL methods may help a bit with logical checking, but so do NL checklists and similar devices.
In all of the 'challenged' projects I've seen and read about, where 'requirements' was identified as a prime causal factor, the representation of individual requirements was not a serious issue. I've certainly seen cases where the supplier deliberately misinterpreted requirements when his time and budget started blowing out, but that's a different issue.
When I see an undisciplined developer who has no real understanding of RE deciding (or being advised) to choose some tool or esoteric technique to solve his 'requirements problem' it makes me want to cry.
It's all a bit like fad diets, isn't it?
Andrew
-- Andrew Gabb email: agabb@tpgi.com.au Adelaide, South Australia phone: +61 8 8342-1021, fax: +61 8 8269-3280 ----- ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- To send a message to this mailing list send it to re-online@it.uts.edu.au. To unsubscribe from this mailing list, email majordomo@it.uts.edu.au with the message `unsubscribe re-online' in the BODY of the mail.
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