“All perception is selection”: establishing an interpretive theoretical basis for information systems requirements engineering

The number and nature of IT/IS project failures over the last 30 years has been well documented and a fundamental issue argued to underlie such failure is that of the difficulty of establishing client, or ‘user, requirements. The purpose of this paper is to use Youngson’s description of the problems of writing history as a way of exploring and highlighting the rich variety of problems we encounter when trying to derive descriptions of user requirements for computer-based information systems. Youngson’s argument that ‘all perception is selection’ is considered in the light of Checkland and Holwell’s discussion of ‘data, capta, information and knowledge’ and Vickers’ concept of ‘appreciation’. It is suggested that, together, these three ideas to provide us with a useful theoretical basis for an Interpretive approach to Requirements Engineering. A major difference of this interpretive approach to Requirements Engineering is that it promotes a process of collaborative learning towards requirements, as opposed to the more traditional approaches which attempt to ‘elicit’, ‘extract’, ‘mine’, or even ‘harvest’ requirements. The paper concludes with suggestions as to how we might implement this theoretical basis with practical Requirement Engineering tools.