Specifying Changes Only – A Case Study on Delta Requirements

Herrmann, Andrea; Wallnöfer, Armin; Paech, Barbara

doi:10.1007/978-3-642-02050-6_5

Cited by 12 publications

(4 citation statements)

References 6 publications

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“…First, the approaches for updating requirements specifications assume an ideal maintenance process where first the requirements are updated then the changes are propagated to the source code [5] [16]. In our approach, however, we consider the frequently recurrent case where only the code was updated while other documents, including requirements, were not modified.…”

Section: E Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Identifying outdated requirements based on source code changes

Charrada

Koziolek

Glinz

2012

2012 20th IEEE International Requirements Engineering Conference (RE)

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Keeping requirements specifications up-to-date when systems evolve is a manual and expensive task. Software engineers have to go through the whole requirements document and look for the requirements that are affected by a change. Consequently, engineers usually apply changes to the implementation directly and leave requirements unchanged. In this paper, we propose an approach for automatically detecting outdated requirements based on changes in the code. Our approach first identifies the changes in the code that are likely to affect requirements. Then it extracts a set of keywords describing the changes. These keywords are traced to the requirements specification, using an existing automated traceability tool, to identify affected requirements. Automatically identifying outdated requirements reduces the effort and time needed for the maintenance of requirements specifications significantly and thus helps preserve the knowledge contained in them. We evaluated our approach in a case study where we analyzed two consecutive source code versions and were able to detect 12 requirements-related changes out of 14 with a precision of 79%. Then we traced a set of keywords we extracted from these changes to the requirements specification. In comparison to simply tracing changed classes to requirements, we got better results in most cases. Identifying Outdated Requirements Based on Source Code ChangesEya Ben Charrada, Anne Koziolek, Martin Glinz Departement of Informatics, University of Zurich, Switzerland {charrada, koziolek, glinz}@ifi.uzh.chAbstract-Keeping requirements specifications up-to-date when systems evolve is a manual and expensive task. Software engineers have to go through the whole requirements document and look for the requirements that are affected by a change. Consequently, engineers usually apply changes to the implementation directly and leave requirements unchanged.In this paper, we propose an approach for automatically detecting outdated requirements based on changes in the code. Our approach first identifies the changes in the code that are likely to affect requirements. Then it extracts a set of keywords describing the changes. These keywords are traced to the requirements specification, using an existing automated traceability tool, to identify affected requirements.Automatically identifying outdated requirements reduces the effort and time needed for the maintenance of requirements specifications significantly and thus helps preserve the knowledge contained in them.We evaluated our approach in a case study where we analyzed two consecutive source code versions and were able to detect 12 requirements-related changes out of 14 with a precision of 79%. Then we traced a set of keywords we extracted from these changes to the requirements specification. In comparison to simply tracing changed classes to requirements, we got better results in most cases.

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Section: E Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…The existing approaches for keeping requirements upto-date can be classified into two categories: Normative approaches require developers to update requirements first, before any code changes are made [5]. However, these approaches suffer from large manual effort to update both artefacts.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Identifying outdated requirements based on source code changes

Charrada

Koziolek

Glinz

2012

2012 20th IEEE International Requirements Engineering Conference (RE)

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“…Managing the evolution of requirements is a problem that has been addressed by several researchers from the software engineering field. Hermann et al address the problem of specifying new requirements by proposing an approach to specify delta requirements in detail while describing the rest of the system on a higher‐level of granularity. Zowghi and Gervasi explore ways to ensure that the requirements specification is correct, consistent, and complete after each change using different validation checks.…”

Section: Related Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

Supporting requirements update during software evolution

Charrada

Koziolek

Glinz

2015

J Software Evolu Process

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Updating the requirements specification when software systems evolve is a manual task that is expensive and time consuming. Therefore, maintainers usually apply the changes to the code directly and leave the requirements unchanged. This results in the requirements rapidly becoming obsolete and useless. In this paper, we propose an approach that supports the maintainer in keeping the requirements specification consistent with the implementation, by identifying the requirements that are impacted whenever the code is changed. Our approach works as follows. First, we analyze the changes that have been applied to the source code and detect if they are likely to impact the requirements or not. Second, we trace the requirements-impacting changes back to the requirements specification to identify the parts that might need to be modified. The output of the tracing is a list of requirements that are sorted according to their likelihood of being impacted. Automatically identifying the parts of the requirements specification that are likely to need maintenance reduces the effort needed for keeping the requirements up-to-date and thus makes the task of the maintainer easier. When applying our approach in three cases studies, 70% to 100% of the impacted requirements were identified within a list that includes less than 20% of the total number of requirements in the specification. SUMMARYUpdating the requirements specification when software systems evolve is a manual task that is expensive and time consuming. Therefore, maintainers usually apply the changes to the code directly and leave the requirements unchanged. This results in the requirements rapidly becoming obsolete and useless. In this paper, we propose an approach that supports the maintainer in keeping the requirements specification consistent with the implementation, by identifying the requirements that are impacted whenever the code is changed. Our approach works as follows. First, we analyze the changes that have been applied to the source code and detect if they are likely to impact the requirements or not. Second, we trace the requirements-impacting changes back to the requirements specification to identify the parts that might need to be modified. The output of the tracing is a list of requirements that are sorted according to their likelihood of being impacted. Automatically identifying the parts of the requirements specification that are likely to need maintenance reduces the effort needed for keeping the requirements up-to-date and thus makes the task of the maintainer easier. When applying our approach in three cases studies, 70% to 100% of the impacted requirements were identified within a list that includes less than 20% of the total number of requirements in the specification.

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“…One of the activities that complicates RE in SPLE is dealing with delta requirements. Delta requirements are called requirements for enhancement of an existing system [12]. As such, delta requirements should be specified separately to truncate the extraneous effort to specifying complete requirements of the system from the scratch.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Requirement Patterns: An Approach for Streamlining Requirements Engineering in Software Product Families

Ya’u¹

2019

IJATCSE

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Reusable structure is essential in all reuse-based software development processes. This provides a solid foundation for seamless management of reusable artefacts especially in software product line engineering (SPLE). One of the potential benefits provided by a well-defined structure is systematic reuse of these artefacts. Requirements pattern approach provides guidelines for requirement engineers to reuse and specify requirements. Although a plethora of research on requirements pattern have been reported in the literature, no research available focuses on requirement engineering (RE) activities of SPLE. In this paper, we present an anatomy of software requirement pattern (SRP) for SPLE with a structured example from e-learning domain. To enable practitioners, understand the concept of requirement pattern more, we present a meta-model for the SRP concepts and their relationships. In addition, we describe how the requirement pattern approach, streamlines RE activities, design for and with reuse in both domain and application engineering processes of SPLE. The requirement pattern approach thus helps in achieving systematic requirements reuse (RR) and generation of structured software requirement specification (SRS) for individual applications.

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Specifying Changes Only – A Case Study on Delta Requirements

Cited by 12 publications

References 6 publications

Identifying outdated requirements based on source code changes

Identifying outdated requirements based on source code changes

Supporting requirements update during software evolution

Requirement Patterns: An Approach for Streamlining Requirements Engineering in Software Product Families

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