Requirements construction and the process of validation

Deriving, or constructing, a set of requirements for a system is a highly interactive and cooperative social process. Checking information for its perceived correctness and completeness is an important part of the specification development process and is known as validating the requirements specifications documents. This paper focuses on the method whereby the end users check the completeness and correctness of the retirements specification. User validation involves the end users of the system approving the specified system with regard to their tasks, goals and responsibilities. This method indicates whether the specification is complete and adequately supports the roles of the users. This paper is based on a case study of an experimental system which was developed to investigate how stakeholders validate the requirements specification. The results indicated that currently available formalised diagrams and concepts concerned with information processing are inappropriate for user validation. The problems which users encountered are discussed and some recommendations for addressing these are outlined