Managing Consistency between Textual Requirements, Abstract Interactions and Essential Use Cases

Abstract

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.

Towards collaboration-centric pattern-based software development support

“…Most progress has been on the detecting of inconsistencies [35], [36], [37], [38], [39], [40], [41], [42] because an inconsistency is indicative of an incomplete or incorrect change propagation. There also have been attempts in generating fixes for inconsistencies [43], [44], [37] where the "fixes" could be seen analogous to propagated changes.…”

Software Requirements Conflict Identification: Review and Recommendations

“…Consistency between requirements requires no two or more requirements contradict each other [8]. In requirements engineering, the term conflict involves interference, interdependency or inconsistency between requirements [1].…”

MaramaAI: Automated and Visual Approach for Inconsistency Checking of Requirements

“…In order to deal with these issues much research has been aimed at checking of requirements consistency, completeness and correctness either by using heuristic algorithms and formal models [3], [4] or semiformal models [5], [6]. In our previous work [7,8], we have introduced the MaramaAI tool for capturing requirements from natural language descriptions and helping to manage requirements inconsistency. The tool captures the essential requirements in the form of abstract interactions from natural language requirements and then transforms it to a semi-formal representation called Essential Use Cases.…”

“…This means that each requirements component will be checked for its consistency with an essential interaction pattern library if any changes such as delete, add and change ordering are done. An essential interaction pattern is a sequence of expected essential interactions between user and system [8]. We have developed a library of such patterns to support interaction extraction from natural language [8] and analysis of interaction sequences.…”

“…An essential interaction pattern is a sequence of expected essential interactions between user and system [8]. We have developed a library of such patterns to support interaction extraction from natural language [8] and analysis of interaction sequences. Figure 1 shows how the higher level inconsistency checking is performed in MaramaAI when the requirements engineer adds a new essential requirement (abstract interaction).…”