Exploring the requirements process for a complex, adaptive system in a high risk software development environment.

Abstract

This work ties together research from a number of different areas to show how the develop-ment of a complex adaptive system for an industrial company has a number of difficulties given the current state of the art. The INFER system which is a Complex Adaptive System (CAS) has a number of attributes which mean that current requirements and indeed develop-ment processes are not able to cope with them adequately. A CAS can be recognised by the fact that it consists of a number of agents acting together dynamically resulting in emergent behaviour. This emergent behaviour cannot be predicted and thus, along with other phenom-ena such as reaction to and with the environment and deciding the different responsibilities of the components means that the requirements process for such a system is a current research area. A retrospective case study is underway to capture the rich data available from the ex-periences of building such a system