A Framework for Multi-layered Requirements Documentation and Analysis

The complexity of current software-intensive systems must be tackled during all phases of the system life cycle. Requirements Engineering is considered both by practitioners and researchers a crucial phase of software development. This article tackles requirements complexity by proposing a framework to document and analyze requirements at different levels of detail, inspired by the layered style of software architecture. Therefore, separation of concerns, an important concept used for software design, is applied in the context of requirements documentation and analysis. The framework has been applied in practice to design software-intensive systems in many domains. Specifically for this article, the proposal is to apply the framework to document and to analyze requirements for road traffic management systems.