Examining the Role of Inference in Understanding Requirements Process during Information Systems Development

Requirement analysis RE has continued to attract attention among information system researchers. The inquiry into exploring how RE actually unfolds as an intellectual exercise is the central preoccupation of this paper. Here we identify requirement analysis as an inferential process, and go on to explaining how the inference unfolds during requirement analysis, then we argue that the IS literature calls an aspect of the RE process an intellectual activity. We think the term intellectual activity is much too broad and we want to explore what constitutes this intellectual activity. We identify the constitution of the intellectual activity as inference and then discuss instances of inference where problems might occur due to contextual diversity. We conjecture that the problem of inference is such that instances of the client’s environment is not able to be transmitted in the same sense using the same logical consistency as the inferring themes might require to understand the concept along with the context. In order to address this problem we use the nature of inference in “Naiyayika” from the Indian logicians and argue that, this school allows for the empirical embedding of the context in the formal syllogism.