E. Knauss, D. Damian, Germán Poo-Caamaño, J. Cleland-Huang
{"title":"Detecting and classifying patterns of requirements clarifications","authors":"E. Knauss, D. Damian, Germán Poo-Caamaño, J. Cleland-Huang","doi":"10.1109/RE.2012.6345811","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1109/RE.2012.6345811","url":null,"abstract":"In current project environments, requirements often evolve throughout the project and are worked on by stakeholders in large and distributed teams. Such teams often use online tools such as mailing lists, bug tracking systems or online discussion forums to communicate, clarify or coordinate work on requirements. In this kind of environment, the expected evolution from initial idea, through clarification, to a stable requirement, often stagnates. When project managers are not aware of underlying problems, development may proceed before requirements are fully understood and stabilized, leading to numerous implementation issues and often resulting in the need for early redesign and modification. In this paper, we present an approach to analyzing online requirements communication and a method for the detection and classification of clarification events in requirement discussions. We used our approach to analyze online requirements communication in the IBM® Rational Team Concert® (RTC) project and identified a set of six clarification patterns. Since a predominant amount of clarifications through the lifetime of a requirement is often indicative of problematic requirements, our approach lends support to project managers to assess, in real-time, the state of discussions around a requirement and promptly react to requirements problems.","PeriodicalId":137833,"journal":{"name":"2012 20th IEEE International Requirements Engineering Conference (RE)","volume":"42 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2012-09-24","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"117271753","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Requirements reuse at Danfoss","authors":"Dagny Hauksdottir, Arne Vermehren, J. Savolainen","doi":"10.1109/RE.2012.6345820","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1109/RE.2012.6345820","url":null,"abstract":"Requirements engineering is an essential activity in creating embedded real-time systems. Companies that produce a number of partially similar products can reduce development time and cost, improve quality and simplify software maintenance by applying reuse practices. Requirements reuse is an essential enabler to achieve effective software reuse. This study describes two different approaches for requirements reuse at Danfoss. The first approach reuses those requirements that are envisioned to be common between two consecutive projects and allows changing and parameterization of parts of the requirements. The second approach organizes all requirements into a common model and explicitly manages variability and different requirement variants in this common model. The results show that both approaches can result in significant savings in reduced effort by reusing common requirements. The first approach was found to be effective when the domain maturity is low and the significant set of requirements were changed from project to project. The second approach allows high reuse potential and significant savings for stable domains, where most requirements tend to be small additions or minor changes of existing requirements.","PeriodicalId":137833,"journal":{"name":"2012 20th IEEE International Requirements Engineering Conference (RE)","volume":"24 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2012-09-24","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"122140109","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Log-based approach for performance requirements elicitation and prioritization","authors":"O. Mendizabal, Martin Spier, Rodrigo S. Saad","doi":"10.1109/RE.2012.6345818","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1109/RE.2012.6345818","url":null,"abstract":"Requirements engineering activities are a critical part of a project's lifecycle. Success of subsequent project phases is highly dependent on good requirements definition. However, eliciting and achieving consensus on priority between all stakeholders is a complex task. Considering software development of large scale global applications, the challenges increase by the need of managing discussions between groups of stakeholders with different roles and background. This paper presents a practical approach for requirements elicitation and prioritization based on realistic user behaviors observation. It uses basic statistic analysis and application usage information to automatically identify the most relevant requirements for majority of stakeholders. An industry case illustrates the feasibility and efficiency of our approach.","PeriodicalId":137833,"journal":{"name":"2012 20th IEEE International Requirements Engineering Conference (RE)","volume":"116 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2012-09-24","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"123644048","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Rasha Tawhid, Edna Braun, N. Cartwright, Mohammad Alhaj, G. Mussbacher, A. Shamsaei, Daniel Amyot, S. Behnam, Gregory Richards
{"title":"Towards outcome-based regulatory compliance in aviation security","authors":"Rasha Tawhid, Edna Braun, N. Cartwright, Mohammad Alhaj, G. Mussbacher, A. Shamsaei, Daniel Amyot, S. Behnam, Gregory Richards","doi":"10.1109/RE.2012.6345813","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1109/RE.2012.6345813","url":null,"abstract":"Transport Canada is reviewing its Aviation Security regulations in a multi-year modernization process. As part of this review, consideration is given to transitioning regulations where appropriate from a prescriptive style to an outcome-based style. This raises new technical and cultural challenges related to how to measure compliance. This paper reports on a novel approach used to model regulations with the Goal-oriented Requirement Language, augmented with qualitative indicators. These models are used to guide the generation of questions for inspection activities, enable a flexible conversion of real-world data into goal satisfaction levels, and facilitate compliance analysis. A new propagation mechanism enables the evaluation of the compliance level of an organization. This outcome-based approach is expected to help get a more precise understanding of who complies with what, while highlighting opportunities for improving existing regulatory elements.","PeriodicalId":137833,"journal":{"name":"2012 20th IEEE International Requirements Engineering Conference (RE)","volume":"9 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2012-09-24","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"130890540","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Flexible, lightweight requirements modeling with Flexisketch","authors":"Dustin Wüest, N. Seyff, M. Glinz","doi":"10.1109/RE.2012.6345826","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1109/RE.2012.6345826","url":null,"abstract":"Early stage requirements models are often documented using paper and pencil-based approaches. In our current research, we are exploring lightweight modeling tools and approaches that could provide a beneficial alternative. We have developed the FlexiSketch tool prototype which combines support for free-form sketching with lightweight metamodeling capabilities. This creates the possibility for an automatic transcription of the documented information in later modeling stages. The tool is designed to be used on tablet devices.","PeriodicalId":137833,"journal":{"name":"2012 20th IEEE International Requirements Engineering Conference (RE)","volume":"327-328 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2012-09-24","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"124100806","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Hui Yang, A. Roeck, V. Gervasi, A. Willis, B. Nuseibeh
{"title":"Speculative requirements: Automatic detection of uncertainty in natural language requirements","authors":"Hui Yang, A. Roeck, V. Gervasi, A. Willis, B. Nuseibeh","doi":"10.1109/RE.2012.6345795","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1109/RE.2012.6345795","url":null,"abstract":"Stakeholders frequently use speculative language when they need to convey their requirements with some degree of uncertainty. Due to the intrinsic vagueness of speculative language, speculative requirements risk being misunderstood, and related uncertainty overlooked, and may benefit from careful treatment in the requirements engineering process. In this paper, we present a linguistically-oriented approach to automatic detection of uncertainty in natural language (NL) requirements. Our approach comprises two stages. First we identify speculative sentences by applying a machine learning algorithm called Conditional Random Fields (CRFs) to identify uncertainty cues. The algorithm exploits a rich set of lexical and syntactic features extracted from requirements sentences. Second, we try to determine the scope of uncertainty. We use a rule-based approach that draws on a set of hand-crafted linguistic heuristics to determine the uncertainty scope with the help of dependency structures present in the sentence parse tree. We report on a series of experiments we conducted to evaluate the performance and usefulness of our system.","PeriodicalId":137833,"journal":{"name":"2012 20th IEEE International Requirements Engineering Conference (RE)","volume":"27 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2012-09-24","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"127696281","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Enhancing candidate link generation for requirements tracing: The cluster hypothesis revisited","authors":"Nan Niu, Anas Mahmoud","doi":"10.1109/RE.2012.6345842","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1109/RE.2012.6345842","url":null,"abstract":"Modern requirements tracing tools employ information retrieval methods to automatically generate candidate links. Due to the inherent trade-off between recall and precision, such methods cannot achieve a high coverage without also retrieving a great number of false positives, causing a significant drop in result accuracy. In this paper, we propose an approach to improving the quality of candidate link generation for the requirements tracing process. We base our research on the cluster hypothesis which suggests that correct and incorrect links can be grouped in high-quality and low-quality clusters respectively. Result accuracy can thus be enhanced by identifying and filtering out low-quality clusters. We describe our approach by investigating three open-source datasets, and further evaluate our work through an industrial study. The results show that our approach outperforms a baseline pruning strategy and that improvements are still possible.","PeriodicalId":137833,"journal":{"name":"2012 20th IEEE International Requirements Engineering Conference (RE)","volume":"37 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2012-09-24","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"129070384","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Identifying outdated requirements based on source code changes","authors":"Eya Ben Charrada, A. Koziolek, M. Glinz","doi":"10.1109/RE.2012.6345840","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1109/RE.2012.6345840","url":null,"abstract":"Keeping requirements specifications up-to-date when systems evolve is a manual and expensive task. Software engineers have to go through the whole requirements document and look for the requirements that are affected by a change. Consequently, engineers usually apply changes to the implementation directly and leave requirements unchanged. In this paper, we propose an approach for automatically detecting outdated requirements based on changes in the code. Our approach first identifies the changes in the code that are likely to affect requirements. Then it extracts a set of keywords describing the changes. These keywords are traced to the requirements specification, using an existing automated traceability tool, to identify affected requirements. Automatically identifying outdated requirements reduces the effort and time needed for the maintenance of requirements specifications significantly and thus helps preserve the knowledge contained in them. We evaluated our approach in a case study where we analyzed two consecutive source code versions and were able to detect 12 requirements-related changes out of 14 with a precision of 79%. Then we traced a set of keywords we extracted from these changes to the requirements specification. In comparison to simply tracing changed classes to requirements, we got better results in most cases.","PeriodicalId":137833,"journal":{"name":"2012 20th IEEE International Requirements Engineering Conference (RE)","volume":"35 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2012-09-24","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"133535845","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Using collective intelligence to detect pragmatic ambiguities","authors":"Alessio Ferrari, S. Gnesi","doi":"10.1109/RE.2012.6345803","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1109/RE.2012.6345803","url":null,"abstract":"This paper presents a novel approach for pragmatic ambiguity detection in natural language (NL) requirements specifications defined for a specific application domain. Starting from a requirements specification, we use a Web-search engine to retrieve a set of documents focused on the same domain of the specification. From these domain-related documents, we extract different knowledge graphs, which are employed to analyse each requirement sentence looking for potential ambiguities. To this end, an algorithm has been developed that takes the concepts expressed in the sentence and searches for corresponding “concept paths” within each graph. The paths resulting from the traversal of each graph are compared and, if their overall similarity score is lower than a given threshold, the requirements specification sentence is considered ambiguous from the pragmatic point of view. A proof of concept is given throughout the paper to illustrate the soundness of the proposed strategy.","PeriodicalId":137833,"journal":{"name":"2012 20th IEEE International Requirements Engineering Conference (RE)","volume":"100 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2012-09-24","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"133600306","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Nupul Kukreja, B. Boehm, S. S. Payyavula, S. Padmanabhuni
{"title":"Selecting an appropriate framework for value-based requirements prioritization","authors":"Nupul Kukreja, B. Boehm, S. S. Payyavula, S. Padmanabhuni","doi":"10.1109/RE.2012.6345819","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1109/RE.2012.6345819","url":null,"abstract":"There are usually more requirements than feasible in a given schedule. Thus, it's imperative to be able to choose the most valuable ones for implementation to ensure the delivery of a high value software system. There are myriad requirements prioritization frameworks and selecting the most appropriate one is a decision problem in its own right. In this paper we present our approach in selecting the most appropriate value based requirements prioritization framework as per the requirements of our stakeholders. Based on our analysis a single framework was selected, validated by requirements engineers and project managers and deployed for company-wide use by a major IT player in India.","PeriodicalId":137833,"journal":{"name":"2012 20th IEEE International Requirements Engineering Conference (RE)","volume":"1 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2012-09-24","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"130486822","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}