Identifying signs of systems fragility: A crowdsourcing requirements case study

It has long been understood that the initial investment in the requirements engineering process has significant returns during the development of a system. Fragility is present in every system, although there are often no signs indicating its presence in system requirements. One can try to predict system breakdown based on its behavior, but the true sources are frequently overlooked. The fact that fragility is recognized when it manifests, suggests that it can be triggered, thus certain trigger conditions should exist. We conducted a case study in order to identify signs in the requirements specification that may lead to systems fragility. As the result of this case study five signs of fragility were identified which can be used in a requirements engineering process to elicit fragility requirements and potential antifragility.