Requirements Sensemaking using Concept Maps Shamal Faily1, John Lyle1, Andre Paul2, Andrea Atzeni3, Dieter Blomme4, Heiko Desruelle4, and Krishna Bangalore5 1 University of Oxford, Oxford UK OX3 0NH,
[email protected] 2 Fraunhofer FOKUS, 10589 Berlin, Germany,
[email protected] 3 Dip di Automatica e Informatica, Politecnico di Torino, 10129 Torino, Italy,
[email protected] 4 Ghent University/IBBT, B-9050 Gent, Belgium,
[email protected] 5 Technische Universität München, 85748 Garching, Germany,
[email protected] Abstract. Requirements play an important role in software engineering, but their perceived usefulness means that they often fail to be properly maintained. Trace- ability is often considered a means for motivating and maintaining requirements, but this is difficult without a better understanding of the requirements themselves. Sensemaking techniques help us get this understanding, but the representations necessary to support it are difficult to create, and scale poorly when dealing with medium to large scale problems. This paper describes how, with the aid of sup- porting software tools, concept mapping can be used to both make sense of and improve the quality of a requirements specification. We illustrate this approach by using it to update the requirements specification for the EU webinos project, and discuss several findings arising from our results. 1 Introduction Techniques, tools, and artifacts may come and go, yet requirements are a consistent element in a software development project. The needs and expectations of stakeholders motivate the elicitation of requirements that software developers use as a contract for what a system should do.