Studying software descriptions in SourceForge and app stores for a better understanding of real-life requirements

Abstract

Users prefer natural language software requirements because of their usability and accessibility. Many approaches exist to elaborate these requirements and to support the users during the elicitation process. But there is a lack of adequate resources, which are needed to train and evaluate approaches for requirement refinement. We are trying to close this gap by using online available software descriptions from SourceForge and app stores. Thus, we present two real-life requirements collections based on online-available software descriptions. Our goal is to show the domain-specific characteristics of content words describing functional requirements. On the one hand, we created a semantic role-labeled requirements set, which we use for requirements classification. On the other hand, we enriched software descriptions with linguistic features and dependencies to provide evidence for the context-awareness of software functionalities.