A broad vision of ProjectIT-Requirements, a new approach for Requirements Engineering

The development of information systems is a complex task, involving technical, human and organizational issues. The results of this activity are not always successful, and are apparent in the lack of software quality and in costs and schedules overruns. The first initiatives developed to solve these problems were concerned with the implementation issues. It is now widely accepted that the real problem comes from the early activities and information gathered in the beginning of the projects, the most important being those connected with system requirements. Although the efforts made and the initiatives proposed, there is not a widely accepted practice or standard in this area, comparable to what we have achieved, for example, in the modeling activities. This paper presents a brief description of the state of the art in the area of requirements specification, explains the motivation to develop a new initiative, which we have called "ProjectIT-Requirements" and describes the goals we want to achieve with the project and the global context in which it integrates.