Abstract This research addresses a major shortcoming in today’s requirements analysis techniques—the lack of a rigorous and comprehensive process to explicitly capture the relationship structure of the problem domain. Whereas other analysis
techniques lightly address the relationship discovery process, relationship analysis (RA) is a systematic, domain-independent analysis technique focusing exclusively on a domain’s relationship structure. This paper describes RA’s taxonomy of relationship types and corresponding brainstorming questions for eliciting the relationship structure from a domain expert. A preliminary case study analysis of online bookstores using RA as well as a formal experiment have both confirmed RA’s effectiveness in helping the analyst produce significantly higher quality requirements.RA should become an invaluable tool for analysts,
irrespective of the software engineering approach taken during systems analysis