Abstract
Requirements managers aim at keeping the set of requirements consistent and up to date throughout the project by conducting the following tasks: requirements categorization, requirements conflict analysis, and requirements tracing. However, the manual conduct of these tasks takes significant effort and is error-prone. In this paper we propose to use semantic technology as foundation for automating the requirements management tasks and introduce the ontology-based reporting approach OntRep. We evaluate the effectiveness and effort the OntRep approach based on a real-world industrial empirical study with professional Austrian IT project managers. Major results were that OntRep provides reasonable capabilities for the automated categorization of requirements, was when compared to a manual approach considerably more effective to identify conflicts, and produced less false positives with similar effort.
Chapter PDF
Similar content being viewed by others
Keywords
References
Boehm, B., In, H.: Identifying Quality-Requirement Conflicts. IEEE Software (1996)
Briggs, R.O., Grünbacher, P.: EasyWinWin: Managing Complexity in Requirements Negotiation with GSS. In: Proceedings of the 35th Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences (2002)
Choi, F.Y.Y.: Advances in domain independent linear text segmentation. In: Proceedings of the 1st North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics Conference. Morgan Kaufmann Publishers Inc., Seattle (2000)
Cleland-Huang, J., Zemont, G., Kukasik, W.: A Heterogeneous Solution for Improving the Return on Investment of Requirements Traceability. In: 12th IEEE Int. Conf. on Requirements Engineering (2004)
Cruz, I.R., Huiyong, X., Feihong, H.: An ontology-based framework for XML semantic integration. In: International Database Engineering and Applications Symposium (IDEAS 2004), pp. 217–226. IEEE, Los Alamitos (2004)
Egyed, A.: A Scenario-Driven Approach to Traceability. In: Proceedings of the 23rd International Conference on Software Engineering (ICSE), Toronto, Canada, pp. 123–132 (2001)
Egyed, A., Grünbacher, P.: Identifying Requirements Conflicts and Cooperation: How Quality Attributes and Automated Traceability Can Help. IEEE Software (2004)
Freimut, B., Punter, T., Biffl, S., Ciolkowski, M.: State-of-the-Art in Empirical Studies, Report: ViSEK/007/E, Fraunhofer Inst. of Experimental Software Engineering (2002)
Gangemi, A., Guarino, N., Masolo, C., Oltramari, A.: Sweetening WordNet with DOLCE. AI Magazine 24(4), 13–24 (2003)
Gotel, O., Finkelstein, A.C.W.: An analysis of the requirements traceability problem. In: 1st International Conference on Requirements Engineering, pp. 94–101 (1994)
Heitmeyer, C.L., Jeffords, R.D., Labaw, B.G.: Automated consistency checking of requirements specifications. In: 2nd International Symposium on Requirements Engineering (RE 1995), York, England (1995)
Jackson, J.: A Keyphrase Based Traceability Scheme. IEEE Colloquium on Tools and Techniques for Maintaining Traceability During Design, 2-1-2/4 (1991)
Kaindl, H.: The Missing Link in Requirements Engineering. ACM SigSoft Software Engineering Notes 18(2), 30–39 (1993)
Leuser, J.: Challenges for semi-automatic trace recovery in the automotive domain. In: Proceedings of the ICSE Workshop on Traceability in Emerging Forms of Software Engineering, TEFSE (2009)
Liddy, E.D.: Natural Language Processing, 2nd edn. Encyclopedia of Library and Information Science. Marcel Decker, Inc., NY (2001)
McMillan, C., Poshyvanyk, D., Revelle, M.: Combining textual and structural analysis of software artifacts for traceability link recovery. In: Proceedings of the ICSE Workshop on Traceability in Emerging Forms of Software Engineering, TEFSE (2009)
Miller, G.A.: WordNet: A Lexical Database for English. Communications of the ACM 38(11), 39–41 (1995)
Pedrinaci, C., Domingue, J., Alves de Medeiros, A.K.: A core ontology for business process analysis. In: Bechhofer, S., Hauswirth, M., Hoffmann, J., Koubarakis, M. (eds.) ESWC 2008. LNCS, vol. 5021, pp. 49–64. Springer, Heidelberg (2008)
van Rijsbergen, C.J., Robertson, S.E., Porter, M.F.: New models in probabilistic information retrieval, British Library Research and Development Report, no. 5587 (1980)
Pinheiro, F.A.C., Goguen, J.A.: An Object-Oriented Tool for Tracing Requirements. IEEE Software 13(2), 52–64 (1996)
Rupp, C.: Requirements Engineering und –Management. Hanser (2002)
Wohlin, C., Höst, M., et al.: Controlled Experiments in Software Engineering. Journal for Information and Software Technology, 921–924 (2001)
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2011 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg
About this paper
Cite this paper
Moser, T., Winkler, D., Heindl, M., Biffl, S. (2011). Requirements Management with Semantic Technology: An Empirical Study on Automated Requirements Categorization and Conflict Analysis. In: Mouratidis, H., Rolland, C. (eds) Advanced Information Systems Engineering. CAiSE 2011. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 6741. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-21640-4_3
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-21640-4_3
Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg
Print ISBN: 978-3-642-21639-8
Online ISBN: 978-3-642-21640-4
eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)