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discussed later in this chapter. The next sections provide some insight into why this is sothrough a brief examination of these BoKs.The Software Engineering Book of KnowledgeIn conjunction with the development of the SoftWare Engineering Body Of Knowledge (SWE-BOK), Requirements Engineering has been defined as a Knowledge Area, and a descriptionprepared (Sawyer and Kotonya, 2000). That document provides both a high level overviewof the RE process and a breakdown of activities it comprises.The process-based structure of the knowledge area is conceptualised as a spiral (see Figure2.6) which terminates either on successful completion of the deliverables (a requirementsspecification of some sort) or due to external forces (such as schedule pressure).Figure 2.6: Spiral model of the RE process (Sawyer and Kotonya, 2000)The breakdown of the six topics is traditional, and can be summarised as follows:Requirements Engineering process – identified as an emerging area, which introducesthe process, places it in an SE context and describes project organisation and contractualissuesrequirements elicitation – concerned with where requirements come from and how theymay be collected. This is seen as a fundamentally human activity69