Grounding Functional Requirements Classification in Organizational Semiotics

Abstract

An information system has its requirements rooted in organizational policies and behaviour, the complexity of which is governed by the hierarchy and the dependencies of the activities within the organization. This complexity makes requirements analysis for an envisioned information system an intricately challenging task. The absence of well-deined body of knowledge clearly specifying which requirements must be looked for further deepens the challenge of requirements analysis. Though requirements are broadly classiied as functional and non-functional, a special concern is required for functional requirements as the information system is expected to meet the behaviour of the organization. We explore the role of organizational semiotics in extracting and analysing functional requirements for an envisioned information system. We also report the results of supervised learning to automatically extract the functional requirements from the existing available documentation.Keywords: organizational semiotics, requirements engineering, functional requirements, business rules IntroductionSoftware Engineering has come a long way after its inception in 1960 with the famous NATO conferences [1,2]. The discussions in these conferences are credited with bringing discipline to the activity of software development and laying down the foundations of this ield by relating it to mathematics. There have been further developments and innovations in an atempt to realize the goals of systematic, disciplined and quantiiable approach to software development.The earliest proposed waterfall process model for software development evolved towards iterative process models and is now being replaced by the latest agile methodologies. In addition © 2017 The Author(s). Licensee InTech. This chapter is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.to process models, programming paradigms have evolved from procedural approach of structured programming [3] to object-oriented programming [4]. However, the goal of a systematic, disciplined and quantiiable approach is still far away. A key role in realizing this goal is played by the requirements, that is the main input to the (engineering) process of software development. Realizing the crucial role of requirements to the design and development of the software, requirements discovery and analysis activities came to be recognized as 'Requirements Engineering (RE)' with the publication of selected papers on RE in Ref. [5] and establishment of regular conferences on RE by IEEE Society. This helped in organizing and bringing discipline to various process models for RE activities and frameworks for analysing requirements. However, the proposed as well as practiced methodologies to ensure consistent, correct, complete and unambiguous requirements have not exhibited the three deining parameters of an engineering...