Requirements Engineering

As already mentioned, requirements engineering is about collecting the requirements and expectations from the future owners and users of a system. It amounts to interview techniques, development of use cases of the envisaged system, informal or formal specification of the results of these interviews or use cases, and consistency checks on these specifications. For all four aspects inventions are conceivable.

Requirements Engineering/Capabilities

Consider the following two hypothetical inventions in Requirements Engineering/Capabilities:⁴

• An interview technique and a manner to train these techniques.
• A social game that leads to better use cases and user involvement.

The state of the art is contained in the requirements engineering literature as a whole but has links to psychology, sociology, and may be business administration. The technical content is likely to be rather non-technical, e.g., a method to let prospective users write stories how they expect the system to behave. The inventive step might be the specific format of the story cards or the use of social techniques. A person skilled in the art will have a background in requirements engineering, and in particular knowledge elicitation and interview techniques. An infringement may, for instance, be an interview technique that uses an essential part of the inventive step.

Discussion

It will be clear that only very specific parts of the above inventions can be protected by copyright. For instance, the layout of story cards. The obvious protective measure is a patent to protect the idea on which the invention is based.

Requirements Engineering/Tools

Consider the following hypothetical invention in Requirements Engineering/Tools:

• A tool to administrate the results of interviews.

The state of the art is here that part of the requirements engineering literature that is devoted to methods and techniques. The technical content amounts to the specific aspects of interviews that are administrated and handled by the tool. The inventive step might be the specific views that are given on the interviews, e.g., statistics that show how well the use cases have been covered by different user groups. A person skilled in the art might be either a requirements engineer or a tool builder. A typical infringement is a tool with the same functionality as the inventive step.

Discussion

Copyright can be used to protect the source code of the tool and its documentation. However, the essential idea embodied in the tool can only be protected by a patent.