Enhancing Software Requirements Cluster Labeling Using Wikipedia

Abstract

Clustering plays an important role in reusable requirements retrieval from the ever-growing software project repositories. The literature on requirements cluster labeling is still emerging. Researchers have investigated clustering to support various software engineering activities such as requirements prioritization, feature identification, automated tracing, and code navigation. The primary task in analyzing the clustering results is to "label" the clusters by means of some representative words to summarize and comprehend the requirements data. Despite the development of automatic cluster labeling techniques for software requirements, very little is understood about enhancing the cluster labels using external knowledge sources such as Wikipedia. In this paper, we review the literature on enhancing cluster labeling, present a framework for requirements cluster labeling and conduct an experiment to evaluate how the Wikipedia-based enhancement performs in labeling requirements clusters. The results show that Wikipedia-based labeling outperforms traditional Information Retrieval (IR) techniques. Our work sheds light on improving automated ways to support information reuse and management in the context of requirements engineering (RE).