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Unpacking Tacit Knowledge for Requirements Engineering

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Managing Requirements Knowledge

Abstract

The use of tacit knowledge is a common feature in everyday communication. It allows people to communicate effectively without forcing them to make everything tediously and painstakingly explicit, provided they all share a common understanding of whatever is not made explicit. If this latter criterion does not hold, confusion and misunderstanding will ensue. Tacit knowledge is also commonplace in requirements where it also affords economy of expression. However, the use of tacit knowledge also suffers from the same risk of misunderstanding, with the associated problems of anticipating where it has the potential for confusion and of unravelling where it has played an actual role in misunderstanding. Thus, the effective communication of requirements knowledge (whether verbally, through a document or some other medium) requires an understanding of what knowledge is and isn’t (necessarily) held in common. This is very hard to get right as people from different professional and cultural backgrounds are typically involved. At its worst, tacit requirements knowledge may lead to software that fails to satisfy the customer’s requirements. In this chapter, we review the diverse views of tacit knowledge discussed in the literature from a wide range of disciplines, reflect on their commonalities and differences and propose a conceptual framework for requirements engineering that characterises the different facets of tacit knowledge that distinguish the different views. We then identify methodological and technical challenges for future research on the role of tacit knowledge in requirements engineering.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Here, we mean the presence of tacit knowledge to mean that there is knowledge that is not accessible to anyone except the actor who holds the knowledge.

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Acknowledgements

The work described in this chapter formed part of the MaTREx (Making Tacit Requirements Explicit) project, which was funded by EPSRC grants EP/F069227/1 and EP/F068859/1

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. University of Pisa, Pisa, Italy

    V. Gervasi

  2. Lancaster University, Lancaster, UK

    R. Gacitua, M. Rouncefield & P. Sawyer

  3. Technische Universität München, Munich, Germany

    L. Kof

  4. The Open University, Milton Keynes, UK

    L. Ma, P. Piwek, A. de Roeck, A. Willis, H. Yang & B. Nuseibeh

  5. Lero, Limerick, Ireland

    B. Nuseibeh

Authors
  1. V. Gervasi
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  2. R. Gacitua
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  3. M. Rouncefield
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  4. P. Sawyer
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  5. L. Kof
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  6. L. Ma
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  7. P. Piwek
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  8. A. de Roeck
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  9. A. Willis
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  10. H. Yang
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  11. B. Nuseibeh
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Correspondence to V. Gervasi .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Informatics / MOBIS, University of Hamburg, Vogt-Kölln-Str. 30, Hamburg, 22527, Germany

    Walid Maalej

  2. Harman Becker Automotive Systems GmbH, Moosacher Str. 48, Munich, 80809, Germany

    Anil Kumar Thurimella

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Gervasi, V. et al. (2013). Unpacking Tacit Knowledge for Requirements Engineering. In: Maalej, W., Thurimella, A. (eds) Managing Requirements Knowledge. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-34419-0_2

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-34419-0_2

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  • Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-642-34418-3

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