An Enhanced Wiki for Requirements Engineering

Abstract

Abstract-The high number of unsuccessful IT projects, due to the inconsistent and ambiguous requirements specifications, justifies the proposal of new socio-technical approaches to overcome these software quality issues. To address these problems it is required a platform that simultaneously enforces Requirements Engineering best practices, fosters stakeholders' participation, and supports requirements negotiation and management. In this paper, we present the rationale and design of an enhanced Wiki for dealing with Requirements Engineering aspects, according to a CSCW approach. Moreover, we discuss the benefits of this Wikibased solution in the broader context of ProjectIT initiative, and how it can leverage the quality and rigor of requirements specifications through its integration with CASE tools.

Can icons enhance requirements engineering work?

“…The RE process is composed of the interwoven sequences of communicative, collaborative, and managerial activities with the overall goal of discovering, specifying, and understanding a software system (Ferreira & Silva, 2009;Svahnberg et al, 2013). RE methods, therefore, should foster communication that distributes collaboration in synchronizing activities (Pohl & Rupp, 2011).…”

“…First, formal and natural language may frequently be innately ambiguous and problematic if stakeholders are unfamiliar with these notations (Falessi et al, 2013;Ferreira & Silva, 2009;Pohl & Rupp, 2011). Problem owners and domain experts might be unable to comprehend a formal specification thus cannot determine whether it perfectly represents their requirements.…”

Distributed Requirements Elicitation Using a Spatial Hypertext Wiki

“…In addition, it provides functions for project management. ProjectIT-Enterprise [48] is another semantic wiki with templates, and project management support.…”

Wiki-Based Tool for Requirements Engineering According to the ProjectIT Approach

“…The process of capturing and reusing the RE's best practices entails the usage of a dynamic attributebased mechanism based upon a generic Wiki metamodel for content-related structural elements. However, the description of this mechanism is beyond the scope of this paper (see [11] for details). This mechanism provides support for managing dynamic metadata of the Wiki-based tool's concepts, which are responsible for supplying structure for the Wiki's content.…”

“…Another task that strongly depends on the human factor is examining logs, reports, and documentation in general. Although it is not supported yet by the tool, an important feature is to use the same NLP techniques for the automatic extraction of information within these documents, after they have been uploaded and attached to the respective WikiPages [11]. These last two techniques deal with very useful and rich sources of information during this activity.…”