Using tagging to identify and organize concerns during pre-requirements analysis

Before requirements analysis takes place in a business context, business analysis is usually performed. Important concerns emerge during this analysis that need to be captured and communicated to requirements engineers. In this paper, we take the position that tagging is a promising approach for identifying and organizing these concerns. The fact that tags can be attached freely to entities, often with multiple tags attached to the same entity and the same tag attached to multiple entities, leads to multi-dimensional structures that are suitable for representing crosscutting concerns and exploring their relationships. The resulting tag structures can be hardened into classifications that capture and communicate important concerns. © 2009 IEEE.