Making Tacit Requirements Explicit

Abstract

The importance of tacit knowledge in Requirements Engineering (RE) is widely acknowledged. While valuable work has developed techniques to expose sources of tacit knowledge during requirements elicitation, such techniques are not universally applied and tacit knowledge, continues to negatively affect the quality of the requirements. In this position paper we present a brief review and interpretation of the literature on tacit knowledge that, we believe, is useful for RE. We describe a number of techniques that offer analysts the means to reason about the effect of tacit knowledge and improve the quality of requirements and their management.