The missing link in requirements engineering

Abstract

Especially the early phase of requirements engineering is one of the most important and least supported parts of the software life cycle. Since pure natural language has its disadvantages, and directly arriving at a formal representation is very difficult, a link through a mediating representation is missing. We use hypertext for this purpose, providing also links among requirements statements and the representation of objects in a domain model. This possibility of explicit representation of links allows the users and analysts to make relationships and dependencies explicit and helps to be aware of them. Actually, our approach and the tool supporting it use a combination of various technologies, including also object-oriented approaches and a grain of artificial intelligence (in particular frames). Therefore, inheritance is provided by our tool already in the early phase of requirements engineering. In particular, we found it very useful to view requirements as objects. A key idea is to support the ordering of ideas especially through classification already in the early stages. While our approach is not intended to substitute useful existing techniques emphasizing more formal representations, it can be combined with them.

An analysis of the requirements traceability problem

“…A number of techniques have been used for providing requirements traceability, including: cross referencing schemes, based on some form of tagging, numbering, or indexing [Evans 1989]; keyphrase dependencies [Jackson 1991]; templates [Interactive Development Environments 1991]; requirements traceability matrices [Davis 1990]; matrix sequences [Brown 1991]; hypertext [Kaindl 1993]; integration documents [Lefering 1993]; assumption-based truth maintenance networks [Smithers et al 1991]; and constraint networks [Bowen et al 1990]. These differ in the quantity and diversity of information they can trace between, in the number of interconnections they can control between information, and in the extent to which they can maintain requirements traceability throughout a project.…”

A study to support agile methods more effectively through traceability

“…-Cross referencing schemes [31] -RT matrices [44,59] -Graph-based representation [60] -Keyphrase dependencies [43] -Hypertext [45] -Integration documents [47] Many commercial tools and research products support RT, primarily because they embody manual or automated forms of the above techniques. Some examples of research tools are detailed in [14,16,36,44,51,58].…”

Requirements Management with Semantic Technology: An Empirical Study on Automated Requirements Categorization and Conflict Analysis

“…Within these trace automation approaches, information retrieval approaches, such as the RETH approach [13], seem of particular interest as they use keyword-matching techniques to identify requirements interdependencies. However, these techniques do not allow identifying conflicts or other interdependencies between requirements, if they use different terms for similar concepts.…”