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DUFICE: Guidelines for a Lightweight Management of Requirements Knowledge

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Managing Requirements Knowledge

Abstract

Working with requirements is a knowledge-intensive task. During the elicitation, comprehension, or management of requirements, practitioners often consume and produce additional information such as domain knowledge, rationale, requirements dependencies, “who knows what”, or how-to’s. However, current requirements engineering processes and tools lack a systematic support for the management of knowledge about requirements. This makes it difficult for practitioners to capture and share such knowledge.

This chapter summarises our experience on implementing a lightweight, pragmatic approach to capture and share requirements knowledge. We recommend practitioners to Draw a knowledge landscape, Use lightweight tools, Follow a simple iterative process, Interact with external communities, Capture tacit knowledge, and Establish a knowledge culture. We introduce these guidelines, report on motivating examples, and discuss how they can be applied successfully in practice.

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Acknowledgments

We thank Barbara Paech, Dennis Pagano, and Yang Li for the constructive and detailed reviews. We are also grateful to all MaRK’08–’10 participants and to our colleagues from the referred companies for the fruitful discussions and the feedback on early versions of this chapter. This work has been supported in part by the FastFix project and TEAM project, which are funded by the 6th and 7th Framework Programmes of the European Commission, Grant Agreement No. FP6-35111 and FP7-258109.

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Maalej, W., Thurimella, A.K. (2013). DUFICE: Guidelines for a Lightweight Management of Requirements Knowledge. In: Maalej, W., Thurimella, A. (eds) Managing Requirements Knowledge. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-34419-0_4

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-34419-0_4

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