Requirements play an important role in software engineering, but their perceived usefulness means that they often fail to be properly maintained. Traceability is often considered a means for motivating and maintaining requirements, but this is difficult without a better understanding of the requirements themselves. Sensemaking techniques help us get this understanding, but the representations necessary to support it are difficult to create, and scale poorly when dealing with medium to large scale problems. This paper describes how, with the aid of supporting software tools, concept mapping can be used to both make sense of and improve the quality of a requirements specification. We illustrate this approach by using it to update the requirements specification for the EU webinos project, and discuss several findings arising from our results.

As personal devices become smarter, opportunities arise for sharing services, applications and data between them. While web technologies hold the promise of being a unifying layer, browsers lack functionality for supporting inter-device communication, synchronization, and security. To address this, we designed webinos: a cross-device distributed middleware providing interoperability, compatibility and security for mobile web applications. In this paper we present a case study of the webinos project, showing how the architecture of webinos was specified, designed and implemented, and reflect on several lessons learned.