Requirements critiquing using domain abstractions

Reusing domain abstractions representing key domain features has been shown to aid requirement specification, however their role in requirements engineering has not been investigated thoroughly. This paper proposes domain abstractions to aid requirements critiquing as well as specification, thus maximising the payoff from retrieving domain abstractions. The requirements critic is part of a prototype intelligent requirements engineering toolkit being developed as part of the Nature project, ESPRIT basic research action 6353. The critic retrieves domain abstractions to validate requirement specifications for problems including incompleteness, inconsistencies and ambiguities. Intelligent, mixed initiative dialogue between the critic and requirements engineer permits requirements critiquing at the right time and level of abstraction