Concept acquisition and analysis for requirements specification

Arguably the most critical of all software development activities is that of requirements specification. Contemporary system development methods address this task in the context of a prescriptive approach, which recognises the need for well identified steps within which a developer builds models on the basis of the method´s requirements specification language. The paper proposes that this approach needs to be augmented by the use of informal models which assist in the very early steps of the requirements specification process. To this end, it discusses the use of a knowledge representation formalism, which provides the necessary foundation for capturing and analysing concepts about an application domain, and a prototype system which assists in this process