Eliciting and maintaining knowledge for requirements evolution

Two of the biggest challenges in knowledge management are to make tacit knowledge explicit and to keep explicit knowledge up-to-date. In this chapter, we focus on how to manage knowledge about a software system with respect to change, so that changes can be evaluated and realized with less effort and without reducing quality. We use a rationale-based approach for making explicit change knowledge and the knowledge activities that need to occur during requirements specification and evolution. The knowledge activities keep the requirements and the change knowledge up-to-date. While these issues have been examined to some extent independently in the requirements, change, and knowledge management communities, we focus on the integration of methods from all three communities. The goal of the chapter is to illustrate the synergy effects and resulting benefits that occur when interleaving knowledge and requirements activities.