Overview

Motivation

A requirement can be syntactically clear, internally consistent, and formally verifiable, but still be difficult for downstream readers to use. A designer may need architectural intent. A verification engineer may need test conditions and acceptance criteria. A supplier may need interface assumptions. A functional safety engineer may need safety rationale and evidence links. A service engineer may need operational interpretation.

RCRE addresses this reader-side problem.

Instead of asking only whether a requirement is well written, RCRE asks whether the requirement is consumable for a specific reader role and engineering task.

Requirement Consumability

In RCRE, requirement consumability refers to the practical ability of intended readers to use a requirement for:

  1. asking the right role-specific questions,
  2. recovering the intended meaning,
  3. determining the next engineering action.

This shifts the evaluation focus from author-centered formulation to reader-centered use.

Reader-Centricity

Reader-centricity is treated as a higher-order construct for explaining requirement consumability. It is organized around three dimensions:

  • Role-Interrogativity (RI): Whether the requirement supports the questions that an intended reader must ask before acting.
  • Interpretability (IN): Whether the intended reader can recover the meaning and supporting basis of the requirement through a short, reliable, and accessible interpretation path.
  • Actionability (AC): Whether the intended reader can determine what engineering action should follow.

These dimensions are not intended to replace conventional requirement quality attributes. Instead, they explain how conventional qualities become usable from the reader’s perspective.