Title: Meta-Requirements for Information System Requirements: Lesson Learned from Software Ecosystem Researches
Abstract: An information system should be specified so that the world containing the system meets the needs of people, who is interested in the world. Such needs are called requirements in problem frames. Concrete requirements have great diversity because each people focuses on different activities in the different worlds. However, we believe all requirements follow some laws when the requirements are proper. We call such laws as meta-requirements. We discuss and enumerate such meta-requirements in this paper so that we can judge some requirements are proper or not. Currently, we have four meta-requirements. First meta-requirement is the decrease of human effort. This is the most traditional and fundamental requirement when an artificial elements such as information systems are embedded in a world. Second one is the increase of human gain, which is dual of the first one. The rest meta-requirements come from researches of software ecosystem. Third meta-requirement is sustainability of the world. Fourth one is the increase of human participation in the world. We have already has our own requirements modeling notation called GDMA. However, we cannot examine requirements written in GDMA against all four meta-requirements. We thus extend our GDMA so that we can examine them against all the meta-requirements. We then exemplify some concrete requirements meet our four meta-requirements.