The state of the art in automated requirements elicitation

ContextIn large software development projects a huge number of unstructured text documents from various stakeholders becomes available and needs to be analyzed and transformed into structured requirements. This elicitation process is known to be time-consuming and error-prone when performed manually by a requirements engineer. Consequently, substantial research has been done to automate the process through a plethora of tools and technologies.ObjectiveThis paper aims to capture the current state of automated requirements elicitation and derive future research directions by identifying gaps in the existing body of knowledge and through relating existing works to each other. More specifically, we are investigating the following research question: What is the state of the art in research covering tool support for automated requirements elicitation from natural language documents?MethodA systematic review of the literature in automated requirements elicitation is performed. Identified works are categorized using an analysis framework comprising tool categories, technological concepts and evaluation approaches. Furthermore, the identified papers are related to each other through citation analysis to trace the development of the research field.ResultsWe identified, categorized and related 36 relevant publications. Summarizing the observations we made, we propose future research to (1) investigate alternative elicitation paradigms going beyond a pure automation approach (2) compare the effects of different types of knowledge on elicitation results (3) apply comparative evaluation methods and multi-dimensional evaluation measures and (4) strive for a closer integration of research activities across the sub-fields of automatic requirements elicitation.ConclusionThrough the results of our paper, we intend to contribute to the Requirements Engineering body of knowledge by (1) conceptualizing an analysis framework for works in the area of automated requirements elicitation, going beyond former classifications (2) providing an extensive overview and categorization of existing works in this area (3) formulating concise directions for future research.     

情景感知的软件需求获取与建模技术综述

情境感知的移动应用能够适应用户当前状态,因此这类应用越来越受到青睐。但由于上下文情景的维度是无数的,这使得获取和建模情境感知系统的情景需求成为一大挑战。本文通过文献综述的方法,旨在:(1)发现有哪些情境感知的需求获取与建模方法;(2)评估这些方法的技术转移成熟度。通过对所选择的61篇相关文献,进行数据抽取和分析综合,本文总结并识别出11种需求获取的方法、10种需求建模的方法以及它们的技术转移现状。结果显示:(1)最受欢迎的情景感知需求获取方法是用例和场景,而最常用的情境感知需求建模方法则是面向目标的方法;(2)在大多数相关文献中的需求获取与建模技术的技术成熟度都不高,不利于其面向工业界进行技术转移。     

Representing and reasoning about preferences in requirements engineering

The priorities that stakeholders associate with requirements may vary from stakeholder to stakeholder and from one situation to the next. Differing priorities, in turn, imply different design decisions for the system to be. While elicitation of requirement priorities is a well-studied activity, modeling and reasoning with prioritization has not enjoyed equal attention. In this paper, we address this problem by extending a state-of-the-art goal modeling notation to support the representation of preference (??nice-to-have??) requirements. In our extension, preference goals are distinguished from mandatory ones. Then, quantitative prioritizations of the former are constructed and used as criteria for evaluating alternative ways to achieve the latter. To generate solutions, an existing preference-based planner is utilized to efficiently search for alternatives that best satisfy a given set of mandatory and preferred requirements. With such a planning tool, analysts can acquire a better understanding of the impact of high-level stakeholder preferences on low-level design decisions.     

Effective Hybrid Content-Based Collaborative Filtering Approach for Requirements Engineering

Requirements engineering (RE) is among the most valuable and critical processes in software development. The quality of this process significantly affects the success of a software project. An important step in RE is requirements elicitation, which involves collecting project-related requirements from different sources. Repositories of reusable requirements are typically important sources of an increasing number of reusable software requirements. However, the process of searching such repositories to collect valuable project-related requirements is time-consuming and difficult to perform accurately. Recommender systems have been widely recognized as an effective solution to such problem. Accordingly, this study proposes an effective hybrid content-based collaborative filtering recommendation approach. The proposed approach will support project stakeholders in mitigating the risk of missing requirements during requirements elicitation by identifying related requirements from software requirement repositories. The experimental results on the RALIC dataset demonstrate that the proposed approach considerably outperforms baseline collaborative filtering-based recommendation methods in terms of prediction accuracy and coverage in addition to mitigating the data sparsity and cold-start item problems.     

Scenario advisor tool for requirements engineering

This study investigates the usefulness of a scenario advisor tool which was built to help requirements engineers to generate sufficient sets of scenarios in the domain of socio-technical systems. The tool provides traceability between scenario models and requirements and helps to generate new scenarios and scenario variations. Through two series of evaluation sessions, we found that the scenario advisor tool helped users to write more sound scenarios without any domain knowledge, and to generate more variations on existing scenarios by providing specific scenario-generation hints for each scenario component. The tool should improve the reliability of requirements elicitation and validation.     

Early verification and validation of mission critical systems

Complex software and systems are pervasive in today’s world. In a growing number of fields they come to play a critical role. In order to provide a high assurance level, verification and validation (V&V) should be considered early in the development process. This paper shows how this can be achieved based on a goal-oriented requirements engineering framework which combines complementary semi-formal and formal notations. This allows the analyst to formalize only when and where needed and also preserves optimal communication with stakeholders and developers. For the industrial application of the methodology, a supporting toolbox was developed. It consist of a number of tightly integrated tools for performing V&V tasks at requirements level. This is achieved through the use of (1) a roundtrip mapping between the requirements language and the specific formal languages used in the underlying formal tools (such as SAT or constraint solvers) and (2) graphical views using domain-based representations. This paper will focus on two major and representative tools: the Refinement Checker (about verification) and the Animator (about validation).     

Improved practical support for large-scale requirements prioritising

An efficient, accurate and practical process for prioritising requirements is of great importance in commercial software developments. This article improves an existing cost-value approach in which stakeholders compare all unique pairs of candidate requirements according to their value and their cost of implementation. Techniques for reducing the required number of comparisons are suggested, thus making the process more efficient. An initial approach for managing requirements interdependencies is proposed. A support tool for the improved process has been developed to make the process more practical in commercial developments. The improved process and its support tool have been applied and evaluated in an industrial project at Ericsson Radio Systems AB. The results indicate a pressing need for mature processes for prioritising requirements, and the work presented here is an important step in that direction.     

The role of domain knowledge in requirements elicitation via interviews: an exploratory study

Requirements elicitation is the first activity in the requirements engineering process. It includes learning, surfacing, and discovering the requirements of the stakeholders of the developed system. Various elicitation techniques exist to help analysts elicit the requirements from the different stakeholders; the most commonly used technique is the interview. Analysts may have domain knowledge prior to the elicitation process. Such knowledge is commonly assumed to have positive effects on requirements engineering processes, in that it fosters communication, and a mutual understanding of the needs. However, to a minor extent, some negative effects have also been reported. This paper presents an empirical study in which the perceived and actual effects of prior domain knowledge on requirements elicitation via interviews were examined. The results indicate that domain knowledge affects elicitation via interview in two main aspects: communication with the customers and understanding their needs. The findings provide insights as to both the positive and negative effects of domain knowledge on requirements elicitation via interview, as perceived by participants with and without domain knowledge, and show the existence of an actual effect on the course of the interviews. Furthermore, these insights can be utilized in practice to support analysts in the elicitation process and to form requirements analysis teams. They highlight the different contributions that can be provided by analysts with different levels of domain knowledge in requirements analysis teams and the synergy that can be gained by forming heterogeneous teams of analysts.     

Systematizing requirements elicitation technique selection

ContextThis research deals with requirements elicitation technique selection for software product requirements and the overselection of open interviews.ObjectivesThis paper proposes and validates a framework to help requirements engineers select the most adequate elicitation techniques at any time.MethodWe have explored both the existing underlying theory and the results of empirical research to build the framework. Based on this, we have deduced and put together justified proposals about the framework components. We have also had to add information not found in theoretical or empirical sources. In these cases, we drew on our own experience and expertise.ResultsA new validated approach for requirements technique selection. This new approach selects techniques other than open interview, offers a wider range of possible techniques and captures more requirements information.ConclusionsThe framework is easily extensible and changeable. Whenever any theoretical or empirical evidence for an attribute, technique or adequacy value is unearthed, the information can be easily added to the framework.     

Synergy between Activity Theory and goal/scenario modeling for requirements elicitation,analysis, and evolution

ContextIt is challenging to develop comprehensive, consistent, analyzable requirements models for evolving requirements. This is particularly critical for certain highly interactive types of socio-technical systems that involve a wide range of stakeholders with disparate backgrounds; system success is often dependent on how well local social constraints are addressed in system design.ObjectiveThis paper describes feasibility research, combining a holistic social system perspective provided by Activity Theory (AT), a psychological paradigm, with existing system development methodologies and tools, specifically goal and scenario modeling.MethodAT is used to understand the relationships between a system, its stakeholders, and the system’s evolving context. The User Requirements Notation (URN) is used to produce rigorous, analyzable specifications combining goal and scenario models. First, an AT language was developed constraining the framework for automation, second consistency heuristics were developed for constructing and analyzing combined AT/URN models, third a combined AT/URN methodology was developed, and consequently applied to a proof-of-concept system.ResultsAn AT language with limited tool support was developed, as was a combined AT/URN methodology. This methodology was applied to an evolving disease management system to demonstrate the feasibility of adapting AT for use in system development with existing methodologies and tools. Bi-directional transformations between the languages allow proposed changes in system design to be propagated to AT models for use in stakeholder discussions regarding system evolution.ConclusionsThe AT framework can be constrained for use in requirements elicitation and combined with URN tools to provide system designs that include social system perspectives. The developed AT/URN methodology can help engineers to track the impact on system design due to requirement changes triggered by changes in the system’s social context. The methodology also allows engineers to assess the impact of proposed system design changes on the social elements of the system context.     

Integrating usability requirements that can be evaluated in design time into Model Driven Engineering of Web Information Systems

In recent years, Web Engineering development projects have grown increasingly complex for and critical to the smooth running of organizations. However, recent studies reveal that a high percentage of these projects fail to attain the quality parameters required by stakeholders. The inadequate consideration of requirements management activities together with the absence of attention to the elicitation and evaluation of requirements and metrics related to certain quality attributes which are of special importance in this kind of systems, such as usability, have proved to be some of the main causes of this failure. This paper attempts to reduce some of the quality failures detected in Web Engineering development projects by proposing the consideration and evaluation of quality attributes from early stages of the development process. The presented approach therefore commences with a reinforcement of the requirements related activities in this discipline, which is carried out by using a requirements metamodel. Once these requirements have been identified, the approach focuses on the extension of the conceptual models used by Web Engineering methodologies with the aim of allowing the explicit consideration of usability requirements along with the evaluation of quality metrics during the design of the system. An example of an application illustrating how the approach can be used, along with the automatic support which was developed for it, are also shown.     

支持MDA的交互式需求获取方法及辅助工具

为支持MDA的开发模式,本文提出了表格驱动的交互式需求获取方法并开发了相应的支持工具.该方法通过填写参与者表、非功能性需求表、用例卡、CRC卡以及用户反馈表来得到用户需求,为建立计算独立模型CIM和平台独立模型PIM提供足够的信息.     

A Tool to Support Collaborative Software Requirements Management

The system requirements specification (SRS) is a highly dynamic document that grows and evolves throughout a software development project, and it is critical that it be carefully engineered and managed. Because the SRS fulfils many roles and is of interest to a diversity of stakeholders, its management should be a collaborative process supported by an automated tool. Commercial requirements management tools are at present insufficiently versatile to support collaboration between a multidisciplinary and potentially distributed team of stakeholders. The requirements for such a collaborative tool are herein presented, alongside the design of a prototype and the findings of its application in a case study.     

Elicitation strategies for soft constraint problems with missing preferences: Properties,algorithms and experimental studies

We consider soft constraint problems where some of the preferences may be unspecified. This models, for example, settings where agents are distributed and have privacy issues, or where there is an ongoing preference elicitation process. In this context, we study how to find an optimal solution without having to wait for all the preferences. In particular, we define algorithms, that interleave search and preference elicitation, to find a solution which is necessarily optimal, that is, optimal no matter what the missing data will be, with the aim to ask the user to reveal as few preferences as possible. We define a combined solving and preference elicitation scheme with a large number of different instantiations, each corresponding to a concrete algorithm, which we compare experimentally. We compute both the number of elicited preferences and the user effort, which may be larger, as it contains all the preference values the user has to compute to be able to respond to the elicitation requests. While the number of elicited preferences is important when the concern is to communicate as little information as possible, the user effort measures also the hidden work the user has to do to be able to communicate the elicited preferences. Our experimental results on classical, fuzzy, weighted and temporal incomplete CSPs show that some of our algorithms are very good at finding a necessarily optimal solution while asking the user for only a very small fraction of the missing preferences. The user effort is also very small for the best algorithms.     

A Method for Extracting and Stating Software Requirements that a User Interface Prototype Contains

User interface and requirements prototyping is a requirements elicitation technique. A user interface and requirements prototype is built during the requirements engineering phase of a software system development. Along with the user interface prototype are produced various documents such as the system requirement specification. When a prototype and other documents exist, they may not describe the same functionality, particularly because there may be behaviour of the prototype, artefacts of prototyping, that may not be intended. The problem is that in later development stages, when there is a prototype and other documents, it is often difficult to reconcile the difference between the prototype and the other documents. This paper presents an approach for avoiding this difficulty. It demonstrates the approach by showing its application to parts of a real software development.     

Development of a computer-based interviewing tool to enhance the requirements gathering process

Software design is an area where it is most important to elicit an accurate and complete set of requirements. Determining the users requirements and their qualitative satisfaction with a developing product are two major problems which arise, often due to the different backgrounds and perspectives of the different stakeholders, including the software engineer, the domain expert and the end-user. Involving users throughout the design and development process is an essential part of any project. Computer-based interviewing has been found to be a valuable tool in eliciting information, which can also enhance interpersonal communication afterwards. This paper discusses the development of a computer interviewing tool to facilitate the gathering of user requirements and conducting user evaluations.     

From event logs to goals: a systematic literature review of goal-oriented process mining

Process mining helps infer valuable insights about business processes using event logs, whereas goal modeling focuses on the representation and analysis of competing goals of stakeholders and systems. Although there are clear benefits in mining the goals of existing processes, goal-oriented approaches that consider logs during model construction are still rare. Process mining techniques, when generalizing large instance-level data into process models, can be considered as a data-driven complement to use case/scenario elicitation. Requirements engineers can exploit process mining techniques to find new system or process requirements in order to align current practices and desired ones. This paper provides a systemic literature review, based on 24 papers rigorously selected from four popular search engines in 2018, to assess the state of goal-oriented process mining. Through two research questions, the review highlights that the use of process mining in association with goals does not yet have a coherent line of research, whereas intention mining (where goal models are mined) shows a meaningful trace of research. Research about performance indicators measuring goals associated with process mining is also sparse. Although the number of publications in process mining and goal modeling is trending up, goal mining and goal-oriented process mining remain modest research areas. Yet, synergetic effects achievable by combining goals and process mining can potentially augment the precision, rationality and interpretability of mined models and eventually improve opportunities to satisfy system stakeholders.

     

Promoting software quality through a human,social and organisational requirements elicitation process

Human, social and organisational (HSO) factors play a decisive role in software development in terms of determining functional and non-functional characteristics of software products. The significance of these factors is underlined by the need to produce applications that fit nicely in a working setting, supporting the working procedures followed and promoting users' content and productivity. In this context, a new requirements elicitation process is proposed, a part of which utilises a short-scale ethnography analysis. The process introduces specific steps for recording HSO factors based on certain software quality characteristics that are treated as principal components for conducting requirements identification. The output of the process is the HSO document, which can be used in conjunction with the classic requirements document to identify structural and functional aspects of the system.