Revisiting the Meaning of Requirements

Understanding the meaning of requirements can help elicit the real world requirements and refine their specifications. But what do the requirements of a desired software mean is not a well-explained question yet though there are many software development methods available. This paper suggests that the meaning of requirements could be depicted by the will-to-be environments of the desired software, and the optative interactions of the software with its environments as well as the causal relationships among these interactions. This paper also emphasizes the necessity of distinguishing the external manifestation from the internal structure of each system component during the process of requirements decomposition and refinement. Several decomposition strategies have been given to support the continuous decomposition. The external manifestation and the internal structure of the system component have been defined. The roles of the knowledge about the environments have been explicitly described. A simple but meaningful example embedded in the paper illustrates the main ideas as well as how to conduct the requirements decomposition and refinement by using these proposed strategies.