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Cited by 734

The DOI matches its Crossref record; 24 of the 24 references it cites were found in a registry or an index.

Four dark corners of requirements engineering

Zave, Pamela, Jackson, Michael·1997·ACM Transactions on Software Engineering and Methodology

Abstract

Research in requirements engineering has produced an extensive body of knowledge, but there are four areas in which the foundation of the discipline seems weak or obscure. This article shines some light in the “four dark corners,” exposing problems and proposing solutions. We show that all descriptions involved in requirements engineering should be descriptions of the environment. We show that certain control information is necessary for sound requirements engineering, and we explain the close association between domain knowledge and refinement of requirements. Together these conclusions explain the precise nature of requirements, specifications, and domain knowledge, as well as the precise nature of the relationships among them. They establish minimum standards for what information should be represented in a requirements language. They also make it possible to determine exactly what it means for requirements and engineering to be successfully completed.

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Metadata

Authors
Zave, P., & Jackson, M.
Venue
ACM Transactions on Software Engineering and Methodology
Published
1997-01
Volume
6
Issue
1
Pages
1-30
ISSN
  • 1049-331X (ISSN-L)
  • 1557-7392
OpenAlex
W2113435553
Cited by
734
References
24
FWCI
57.50
Type
journal article
Language
en
Open access
closed

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CoChat. (2026). Citation check: Four dark corners of requirements engineering. https://app.cochat.ai/papers/10.1145/237432.237434
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Zave, P., & Jackson, M. (1997). Four dark corners of requirements engineering. ACM Transactions on Software Engineering and Methodology. https://doi.org/10.1145/237432.237434

Data sources

Bibliographic data: Semantic Scholar, OpenAlex, Crossref.

Contains information from the Semantic Scholar Academic Graph Datasets, made available under the ODC Attribution License (ODC-BY 1.0).

Semantic Scholar’s data is described in: Kinney, R., et al. (2023). The Semantic Scholar Open Data Platform. arXiv:2301.10140.