Journal of Software Engineering and Applications, 2011, 4, 718-728 doi:10.4236/jsea.2011.412084 Published Online December 2011 (http://www.SciRP.org/journal/jsea) Copyright © 2011 SciRes. JSEA A Knowledge Management Framework in Software Requirements Engineering Based on the SECI Model Azeddine Chikh Information Systems Department, College of Computer & Information Sciences, King Saud University, Riyadh, Saudi Arabia. Email: az_chikh@ksu.edu.sa Received October 7 th , 2011; revised November 14 th , 2011; accepted November 27 th , 2011. ABSTRACT Software requirements engineering deals with: elicitation, specification, and validation of software requirements. Fur- thermore there is a need to facilitate collaboration amongst stakeholders and analysts. Fewer efforts were deployed to support them in performing their job on a day to day basis. To solve this problem we use knowledge management for software requirements engineering. This paper proposes a knowledge management framework, based on the SECI model of knowledge creation, aimed at exploiting tacit and explicit knowledge related to software requirements within a given software project. The core part of the proposed framework is a set of four sub systems “Socializer”; “External- izer”; “Combiner”; and “Internalizer”, attached to a couple of domain ontologies and a set of knowledge assets. In- deed we aim to facilitate a semantic based interpretation of knowledge assets related to software requirements by re- stricting their interpretation through the application domain and software requirements ontologies. We anticipate that this framework would be very helpful for stakeholders as well as analysts to exchange and manage their knowledge within a given software project. We show in the case study, through a virtual payroll project using the two-step ap- proach: domain level requirements plus design level requirements, how the key elicitation SRE techniques are used during the first phase of domain requirements elicitation through the four subsystems of our framework. Keywords: Software Requirements Engineering, Knowledge Management, Domain Ontologies, SECI Model 1. Introduction The communities of software engineering and knowledge engineering share a number of common topics. Whereas software engineering research has been continuously stru- ggling towards a higher abstract software modeling during the last decade, the knowledge engineering community has been enthusiastic to promote numerous modeling ap- proaches to conceptualize a domain of knowledge. In the literature, several research works have been directed to- wards knowledge management in software requirements engineering (SRE) [1-4]. New era of SRE management starts focusing on knowledge management of software requirements within a given project. Such a knowledge must include not only the generic knowledge of individ- ual specialty fields of the domain of SRE and the project application domain (payroll, finances, sales, etc.) but knowledge of the best practices captured from the previ- ous and similar projects. Activities in the domain of SRE typically involve people from at least two fields: 1) the business field (customers /users and other stakeholders) and 2) the IT field (ana- lysts, requirements engineers and software project man- agers). This diversity of actors often produces important information flows and knowledge exchange that are dif- ficult to manage. A broad variety of requirements engi- neering models, techniques, and technological environ- ments such as Computer-Aided Analysis/Engineering tools have been designed and implemented by researchers. They are used to help gathering, analyzing, and documenting software requirements. However, a lack of efforts was observed in the way requirements engineering practi- tioners are being supported in their daily activeties. There is a need to help those actors managing collaboratively and exchanging their knowledge building shared prac- tices (best practices). After this introduction, Section 2 recalls the SRE do- main. Section 3 introduces the use of ontologies in this domain. Section 4 explores the SECI model of knowl- edge creation and shows how it is applied to this domain.