This very short contribution views requirements engineering as a social collaborative activity. In particular, the authors quote Dick Gabriel to express the issue: “The key part of [ultra-large-scale, ULS] is to say it’s impossible to gather the requirements” [1]. This seemingly simple idea is novel, provides a new perspective on software development, and is highly applicable to real-world problems.

The authors propose “employing ... techniques from collective intelligence based on popular Web 2.0 tools and technologies, including wikis, tags, and [the] semantic Web.” As a solution, they propose a roadmap (the three-step process) and a “working agenda to address the challenges in pre-requirements analysis of large and complex systems.” As the authors point out, “this is currently a method framework” and doesn’t cover many technical details; hence, it’s a progress report.

The paper includes two figures and 21 useful references. It will be interesting to see the end results that the authors publish in the future. This publication should be useful to anyone involved in requirements engineering and the development of ULS systems.