Ontology-Based Classification of Non-functional Requirements in Software Specifications: A New Corpus and SVM-Based Classifier

Abstract

A software requirements specification (SRS) contains all the requirements for a system-to-be. These are typically separated into functional requirements (FR), which describe the features of the system under development, and the nonfunctional requirements (NFR), which include quality attributes, design constraints, among others. It is well known that NFRs have a large impact on the overall cost and time of the system development process, as they frequently describe cross-cutting concerns. In order to improve software development support, an automated analysis of SRS documents for different NFR types is required. Our work contains two significant contributions towards this goal: (1) A new gold standard corpus containing annotations for different NFR types, based on a requirements ontology; and (2) a Support Vector Machine (SVM) classifier to automatically categorize requirements sentences into different ontology classes. Results obtained from two different SRS corpora demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach.

The Most Important Functional and Non-Functional Requirements of Knowledge Sharing System at Public Academic Institutions: A Case Study

“…Furthermore, to achieve a high quality software system, both FR and NFR should be addressed [12], [26]. Therefore, in this study both types of requirements have been taken into confederation.…”

Classification and Qualitative Analysis of Non-Functional Requirements Approaches

“…Aspect-oriented Pattern-based • Usability Elicitation Framework [21] • Performance evolution model [32] • NFR classifier [33] • NFR Locator [34] • NFR catalogue [35] • NFR taxonomy [36] • Usability catalogue [18] • NFR classification [37] In goal-oriented approach, requirements are illustrated in hand-drawn user interface looks and specify necessary details of the requirements [21,32]. In aspect-oriented approach, requirements specification techniques are proposed for automated requirements specification and categorization from a wide variety of requirements document [33,34].…”

Classification of Non-Functional Requirements Using Semantic-FSKNN Based ISO/IEC 9126

“…However, identifying non-functional requirement is not an easy thing because of several factors such as the lack of standards in identifying the non-functional requirement, the non-functional requirement is often encountered incomplete and it is often hidden or mixed in the functional requirement sentences [5] [6], the requirement sentence written in natural language usually have ambiguity which would make it difficult to identify the aspects of quality of non-functional requirement contained in it [7]. Therefore, we need ways tobe able to identify This research aims to design a system that can automatically classifyn on-functional requirement from various requirement documents.…”

“…Basically, the process of classification consists of single-label and multi-label, some method developments mentioned above are still limited in single-label, whereas in fact, there is a possibility that one option of requirement sentence in requirement document contains more than one aspect of nonfunctional requirement (multi-label) [7] [16]. The method development above, has also not considered a factor of semantic relationships between each category of non-functional requirement and term that are processed during the training, because in fact semantic factor can improve the classification result to be better [17] [18].…”