An industrial case study in reconstructing requirements views

Requirements views, such as coverage and status views, are an important asset for monitoring and managing software development projects. We have developed a method that automates the process of reconstructing these views, and we have built a tool, ReqAnalyst, that supports this method. This paper presents an investigation as to which extent requirements views can be automatically generated in order to monitor requirements in industrial practice. The paper focuses on monitoring the requirements in test categories and test cases. In order to retrieve the necessary data, an information retrieval technique, called Latent Semantic Indexing, was used. The method was applied in an industrial study. A number of requirements views were defined and experiments were carried out with different reconstruction settings for generating these views. Finally, we explored how these views can help the developers during the software development process.

Hans-Gerhard GrossEmail:

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Marco Lormans   is a PhD researcher at the Software Engineering department of Delft University of Technology and a consultant at Logica. He received a MSc. in computer science from Delft University of Technology. His research interests encompass (global) software development, and in particular the specification and management of requirements, and software quality assurance. Arie van Deursen   is a full professor at Delft University of Technology, where he is heading the Software Engineering Research Group. He obtained his MSc degree in computer science in 1990 from the Vrije Universiteit, Amsterdam. From 1996 until 2006 he was a research leader at CWI, the Dutch National Institute for Research in Mathematics in Computer Science. His research interests include software evolution and reverse engineering, as well as model-driven approaches to software engineering. He is one of the co-founders of Software Improvement Group, an Amsterdam-based software consultancy firm in the area of software system analysis. He has served on numerous program committees in the areas of software evolution, maintenance, and software engineering in general, and has been program chair for the IEEE Working Conference on Reverse Engineering in 2002 and 2003. Hans-Gerhard Gross   received an MSc in Computer Science (1996) from the University of Applied Sciences, Berlin, Germany, and a PhD in Software Engineering (2000) from the University of Glamorgan, Wales, UK. Following his PhD, Dr. Gross joined the Fraunhofer Institute for Experimental Software Engineering in Kaiserslautern, Germany, where he was responsible for a number of public research projects, devising software testing strategies, and for consulting projects with major German software organizations. Since 2005, Dr. Gross is employed as Assistant Professor at Delft University of Technology, The Netherlands. His research interests encompass all phases of software development, in general, and software testing, in particular.