REVERE: support for requirements synthesis from documents

Abstract

Documents are important sources of system requirements. This is particularly true of domains that are document-centric in terms of their operational and development processes. For system evolution in organisations that have been subject to organisational change and loss of organisational memory, documents may be the major source of key requirements. Hence, systems engineers often face a daunting task of synthesising crucial requirements from a range of documents that include standards, interview transcripts and legacy specifications. The goal of REVERE was to investigate support for this task which has been described as document archaeology (Robertson and Robertson, 1999). This paper describes the resulting REVERE toolset, its utility for document archaeology and for other tasks that have emerged in the course of our experiments with the toolset.