Improving requirements quality using essential use case interaction patterns.

Capturing software requirements from clients often leads to error prone and vague requirements documents. To surmount this issue, requirements engineers often choose to use UML models to capture their requirements. In this paper we discuss the use of Essential Use Cases (EUCs) as an alternative, user-centric representation which was developed to ease the process of capturing and describing requirements. However, EUCs are not commonly used in practice because, to our knowledge, no suitable tool support has been developed. In addition, requirements engineers face difficulties in finding the correct "essential" requirements (abstract interactions) in a time efficient manner. In order to overcome these problems, we have developed a prototype tool for automated tracing of abstract interactions. We describe the tool and compare the performance and correctness of the results provided by it to that of manual essential use case extraction efforts by a group of requirements engineers. The results of an end user study of the tool's usefulness and ease of use are also discussed.

Consistency checking needs to be done from the earliest phase of requirements capture as requirements captured by requirement engineers are often vague, error-prone and inconsistent with users' needs. To improve such consistency checking we have applied a traceability approach with visualization capability. We have embedded this into a lightweight automated tracing tool in order to allow users to capture their requirements and generate Essential Use Case models of these requirements automatically. Our tool supports inconsistency checking between textual requirements, abstract interactions that derive from the text and Essential Use Case models. A preliminary evaluation has been conducted with target end users and the tool usefulness and ease of use are evaluated. We describe our motivation for this research, our prototype tool and results of our evaluation.

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Generating essential user interface prototypes to validate requirements.

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Requirements need to be validated at the early phase of the software development to avoid errors such as inconsistency, incompleteness and incorrectness. Drawn from this argument, a requirements validation process needs to consider Consistency, Completeness and Correctness ("3 Cs") for the production of a quality software specifications. This paper provides a review of requirements validation and consistency management based on the existing literature in order to identify the gaps in the existing knowledge on the process of software requirements specifications. This paper begins with a review of the definitions of the 3Cs,upon which the understanding of the 3Cs is derived. Next comprehensive review of related works on the identified consistency management techniques: traceability and analysis approaches are then presented. This is supported with a heat map representations of the related research on the types of contributions, techniques, specifications and semantics used in consistency management. Since semiformal specifications were found as the most common representation of the requirements, the types of models used as semi-formal specifications to represent the requirements were also discussed. Overall, this paper identifies the various gaps existing within the process of validating and managing the consistency of requirements to avoid re-inventing the wheels in the diverse and comprehensive knowledge of requirements engineering.