Requirements engineering is justifiably receiving increased attention at present as deficiencies in this endeavour are often cited as being responsible for poor project outcomes. The paper opens by identifying the goals for the next generation of requirements engineering support tools and postulates that requirements engineering practice and tools will require more than an incremental improvement to achieve these goals. The approach proffered is to apply expert system techniques to the problem. Through an examination of previous research we propose that a highly capable requirements engineering tool can be built based on intelligent agents operating on a bespoke frame-based knowledge representation architecture. Evidence is presented that the approach has the representational richness and reasoning power to undertake the functionality identified as being necessary to assist requirements engineering.
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