{"title":"NFRNet: A Deep Neural Network for Automatic Classification of Non-Functional Requirements","authors":"Bingyu Li, Zhi Li, Yilong Yang","doi":"10.1109/RE51729.2021.00057","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1109/RE51729.2021.00057","url":null,"abstract":"Non-functional requirements specify those qualities that software products must have in order to meet the user’s business requirements. The elicitation of these non-functional requirements requires expertise, experience, and domain knowledge, which is challenging and time-consuming for requirements engineers and developers. It would be very beneficial if the nonfunctional requirements can be automatically extracted from the requirements documentation to reduce the human efforts, time, and avoid the mental fatigue. In this paper, we present a novel deep neural network model called NFRNet to automatically extract non-functional requirements from software requirements documentation.","PeriodicalId":440285,"journal":{"name":"2021 IEEE 29th International Requirements Engineering Conference (RE)","volume":"94 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"126077261","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":"What can Open Domain Model Tell Us about the Missing Software Requirements: A Preliminary Study","authors":"Ziyan Zhao, Li Zhang, Xiaoli Lian","doi":"10.1109/RE51729.2021.00010","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1109/RE51729.2021.00010","url":null,"abstract":"Completeness is one of the most important attributes of software requirement specification. Unfortunately, incompleteness is one of the most difficult violations to detect. Some approaches have been proposed to detect missing requirements based on the requirement-oriented domain model. However, these kinds of models are actually lack for lots of domains. Fortunately, the domain models constructed for different purposes can usually be found online. This raises a question: whether or not these domain models are useful for finding the missing functional information in requirement specification? To explore this question, we design and conduct a preliminary study by computing the overlapping rate between the entities in domain models and the concepts of natural language software requirements, and then digging into four regularities of the occurrence of these entities(concepts) based on two example domains. The usefulness of these regularities, especially the one based our proposed metric AHME (with 54% and 70% of F2 on the two domains), has been initially evaluated with an additional experiment.","PeriodicalId":440285,"journal":{"name":"2021 IEEE 29th International Requirements Engineering Conference (RE)","volume":"69 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"121711207","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":"A Survey of Instructional Approaches in the Requirements Engineering Education Literature","authors":"Marian Daun, A. Grubb, B. Tenbergen","doi":"10.1109/RE51729.2021.00030","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1109/RE51729.2021.00030","url":null,"abstract":"Requirements engineering (RE) has established itself as a core software engineering discipline. It is well acknowledged that good RE leads to higher quality software and considerably reduces the risk of failure or exceeding budgets of software development projects. Therefore, it is of vital importance to train future software engineers in RE and educate future requirements engineers to adequately manage requirements in various projects. However, to date there exists no central concept of what the most useful educational approaches are in RE education in order to best interweave theory with practice. To lay the foundation for this important mission, we conducted a systematic literature review. In this paper, we report on the results and provide a synthesis of instructional approaches in RE education. Findings show that experiential learning through projects, collaboration, and realistic stakeholder involvement are among the most promising trends to teach both RE theory and develop student soft skills.","PeriodicalId":440285,"journal":{"name":"2021 IEEE 29th International Requirements Engineering Conference (RE)","volume":"38 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"121876622","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":"On the Role of User Feedback in Software Evolution: a Practitioners’ Perspective","authors":"Simon van Oordt, Emitzá Guzmán","doi":"10.1109/RE51729.2021.00027","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1109/RE51729.2021.00027","url":null,"abstract":"User feedback is indispensable in software evolution. Previous work has proposed ways for automatically extracting requirements, bug reports and other valuable information from feedback. However, little is actually known about how user feedback— especially the one available through newer channels, such as social media—is incorporated in development processes. To date, only a few case studies discuss the matter and the results are not always consistent. We carried out a mixed methods study to understand the current state of practice of harnessing user feedback in software development. Qualitatively, we performed interviews with 18 software practitioners to get a deeper understanding of the role of user feedback in software evolution. Quantitatively, we surveyed 101 software practitioners to cross-validate the interview findings and improve the generalizability of the results. We found that feedback is captured to (1) identify bugs, features and usability issues, (2) get a better understanding of the user, and (3) prioritize requirements. Our results indicate that analyzing feedback is time-consuming and has a number of challenges. Among them, feedback is typically analyzed manually and is spread over a wide range of channels and company departments. Our findings stress the current importance for cross-department cooperation and call for the exploration of tools that can centralize user feedback.","PeriodicalId":440285,"journal":{"name":"2021 IEEE 29th International Requirements Engineering Conference (RE)","volume":"22 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"114429424","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":"SusAF Welcomes SusApp: Tool Support for the Sustainability Awareness Framework","authors":"Maike Basmer, Timo Kehrer, B. Penzenstadler","doi":"10.1109/RE51729.2021.00049","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1109/RE51729.2021.00049","url":null,"abstract":"As sustainability increasingly gains attention, it has also found its way into the area of software engineering, with a specific emphasis on requirements engineering. The Sustainability Awareness Framework (SusAF) proposed by Duboc et al. supports stakeholders in taking the long view at their software systems in terms of sustainability. In this paper, we propose SusApp, a web-based tool to simplify the application of the SusAF. In particular, it facilitates the documentation and visualization of effects on sustainability. To learn about the users’ perception of SusApp, we conducted two small-scale user studies that investigated the tool’s usability and usefulness. Overall, the studies showed that the tool was generally perceived positively by the participants. However, shortcomings in the usability became apparent, which have also impacted the perceived usefulness.","PeriodicalId":440285,"journal":{"name":"2021 IEEE 29th International Requirements Engineering Conference (RE)","volume":"1 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"125460252","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}
M. Ye, Jicheng Cao, Shengyu Cheng, Dong Liu, Shenghai Xu, Jinning He
{"title":"MRDQA: A Deep Multimodal Requirement Document Quality Analyzer","authors":"M. Ye, Jicheng Cao, Shengyu Cheng, Dong Liu, Shenghai Xu, Jinning He","doi":"10.1109/RE51729.2021.00063","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1109/RE51729.2021.00063","url":null,"abstract":"In the field of requirement document quality assessment, existing methods mainly focused on textual patterns of requirements. Actually, the cognitive process that experts read and qualitatively measure a requirement document is from outward appearance to inner essence. Inspired by this intuition, this paper proposed a Multimodal Requirement Document Quality Analyzer (MRDQA), a neural model which combines the textual content with the visual rendering of requirement documents for quality assessing. MRDQA can capture implicit quality indicators which do not exist in requirement text, such as tables, diagrams, and visual layout. We evaluated MRDQA on the requirement documents collected from ZTE and achieved 81.3% accuracy in classifying their quality into three levels (high, medium, and low). We have successfully applied MRDQA as a pre-filter in ZTE’s requirement review system. It identifies low and medium quality requirements, thereby allows review experts to focus only on high-quality requirements. With this mechanism, the workload can be greatly reduced and the requirement review process can be accelerated.","PeriodicalId":440285,"journal":{"name":"2021 IEEE 29th International Requirements Engineering Conference (RE)","volume":"82 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"132410077","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}
Jan-Philipp Steghöfer, Björn Koopmann, J. Becker, Mikaela Törnlund, Yulla Ibrahim, Mazen Mohamad
{"title":"Design Decisions in the Construction of Traceability Information Models for Safe Automotive Systems","authors":"Jan-Philipp Steghöfer, Björn Koopmann, J. Becker, Mikaela Törnlund, Yulla Ibrahim, Mazen Mohamad","doi":"10.1109/RE51729.2021.00024","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1109/RE51729.2021.00024","url":null,"abstract":"Traceability management relies on a supporting model, the traceability information model (TIM), that defines which types of relationships exist between which artifacts and contains additional constraints such as multiplicities. Constructing a TIM that is fit for purpose is crucial to ensure that a traceability strategy yields the desired benefits. However, which design decisions are critical in the construction of TIMs and which impact they have on the usefulness and applicability of traceability is still an open question. In this paper, we use two cases of TIMs constructed for safety-critical, automotive systems with industrial safety experts, to identify key design decisions. We also propose a comparison scheme for TIMs based on a systematic literature review and evaluate the two cases as well as TIMs from the literature according to the scheme. Based on our analyses, we thus derive key insights into TIM construction and the design decisions that ensure that a TIM is fit for purpose.","PeriodicalId":440285,"journal":{"name":"2021 IEEE 29th International Requirements Engineering Conference (RE)","volume":"27 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"132876706","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":"MARE: an Active Learning Approach for Requirements Classification","authors":"Cláudia Magalhães, João Araújo, Alberto Sardinha","doi":"10.1109/RE51729.2021.9714537","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1109/RE51729.2021.9714537","url":null,"abstract":"Several studies indicate that poor requirements practices, that result in incomplete or inaccurate requirements, poorly managed requirement changes, and missed requirements, are the most common factors in project failure. Possible solutions for better requirements definition include better requirements documentation, and requirements reuse. In this paper, we present a novel application of machine learning and active learning to classify the requirements of a given dataset. This approach can accelerate project development. By organizing the requirements into categories, developers can easily see what requirements were already implemented, and where they need to focus on the next step of development.","PeriodicalId":440285,"journal":{"name":"2021 IEEE 29th International Requirements Engineering Conference (RE)","volume":"88 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"131853287","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":"Zoom4PF: A Tool for Refining Static and Dynamic Domain Descriptions in Problem Frames","authors":"Shangfeng Wei, Zhi Li, Yilong Yang, Hongbin Xiao","doi":"10.1109/RE51729.2021.00047","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1109/RE51729.2021.00047","url":null,"abstract":"Problem analysis has long been considered the key to requirements engineering, and the Problem Frames (PF) approach provides a structured method by deploying a common model for analyzing various types of problems. Problem decomposition is an important technique in structuring the software solution and also the key to reducing problem size and complexity. However, there has not been a suite of flexible and effective tools to describe details of problem domains in PF models. In this paper, we combine model-driven engineering and PF to provide a tool that can refine domain descriptions. In order to support modeling between domain stakeholders and software designers, we provide a technique and tool to allow the modeller to zoom in the details of a problem diagram, by adding UML State Machine Diagrams and SysML Block Definition Diagrams to domain descriptions.A demo video of this tool is available at https://youtu.be/BcQPlDYiOa8. More details of this tool and the appendix to this article are available at https://github.com/Wsfff-lf/ZOOM4PF/tree/main.","PeriodicalId":440285,"journal":{"name":"2021 IEEE 29th International Requirements Engineering Conference (RE)","volume":"135 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"132656415","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}
Ranit Chatterjee, Abdul Ahmed, Preethu Rose Anish, B. Suman, Prashant Lawhatre, S. Ghaisas
{"title":"A Pipeline for Automating Labeling to Prediction in Classification of NFRs","authors":"Ranit Chatterjee, Abdul Ahmed, Preethu Rose Anish, B. Suman, Prashant Lawhatre, S. Ghaisas","doi":"10.1109/RE51729.2021.00036","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1109/RE51729.2021.00036","url":null,"abstract":"Non-Functional Requirements (NFRs) focus on the operational constraints of the software system. Early detection of NFRs enables their incorporation into the architectural design at an initial stage, a practice obviously preferable to expensive refactoring at a later stage. Automated identification and classification of NFRs has therefore seen numerous efforts using rule-based, machine learning and deep learning-based approaches. One of the major challenges for such an automation is the manual effort that needs to be invested into labeling of training data. This is a concern for large software vendors who typically work on a variety of applications in diverse domains. We address this challenge by designing a pipeline that facilitates classification of NFRs using only a limited amount (~ 20% of an available new dataset) of labeled data for training. We (1) employed Snorkel to automatically label a dataset comprising NFRs from various Software Requirement Specification documents, (2) trained several classifiers using it, and (3) reused these pre-trained classifiers using a Transfer Learning approach to classify NFRs in industry-specific datasets. From among the various language model classifiers, the best results have been obtained for a BERT based classifier fine-tuned to learn the linguistic intricacies of three different domain-specific datasets from real-life projects.","PeriodicalId":440285,"journal":{"name":"2021 IEEE 29th International Requirements Engineering Conference (RE)","volume":"12 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"133822043","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}