Ruven mentionned a number of fascinating topics (well worth
researching) in PoSE, but one in particular drew my
attention:
Requirements and specifications. Is there a psychological separation between a requirement and a specification or is it all context dependent?
Requirements and specifications. Is there a psychological separation between a requirement and a specification or is it all context dependent?
There *ought* to be a separation, but there seems to be a
huge amount of confusion there. Any research that could shed light on how
to get people to separate goals version the written version of these goals,
as well as cleanly separating statements about the problem domain versus
statements about the solution domain (ie a clean separation
between requirements and design) would be
fantastic.
A frequent disease of many requirements documents is talking in
terms of the solution space instead of talking clearly in the problem
space. This leads to all sorts of premature design decisions that are
quite costly to revert later. Of course, as Parnas as cogently argued some
years back [1], it seems impossible for people
to think in terms of problem space, so that one must 'fake it'. Getting
some real data on this would be really good.
Jacques
[1] "A Rational Design Process: How and Why to Fake
it", IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering, Vol. SE-12, no. 2, Feburary
1986, pp. 251-257)
