Abstract

The field of requirements engineering emerges out of tradition of research and engineering practice that stresses the importance of generalizations and abstractions. Although abstraction is essential to design it also has its dark side. By abstracting away from the context of an investigation, the designer too easily lapses into modeling only those things that are easy to model. The subtleties, special cases, interpretations and concrete features of the context of use are smoothed over in the rush to capture the essence of the requirements. Often, however, what is left out is essential to understanding stakeholders ' needs. In contrast, approaches that stress context at the expense of abstraction may lead to floundering or to short-term customer satisfaction at the expense of long-term fragility

Citations