What Questions do Requirements Engineers Ask?

Malviya, Sugandha; Vierhauser, Michael; Cleland‐Huang, Jane; Ghaisas, Smita

doi:10.1109/re.2017.76

Cited by 13 publications

(18 citation statements)

References 18 publications

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“…In light of the recent work on collecting practitioners' natural-language requirements queries (e.g., [42][43][44]), the patterns uncovered by our study could be used to better classify and answer project stakeholders' traceability needs.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Creating Socio-Technical Patches for Information Foraging: A Requirements Traceability Case Study

Cepulis

Niu

2018

2018 IEEE Symposium on Visual Languages and Human-Centric Computing (VL/HCC)

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Work in information foraging theory presumes that software developers have a predefined patch of information (e.g., a Java class) within which they conduct a search task. However, not all tasks have easily delineated patches. Requirements traceability, where a developer must traverse a combination of technical artifacts and social structures, is one such task. We examine requirements socio-technical graphs to describe the key relationships that a patch should encode to assist in a requirements traceability task. We then present an algorithm, based on spreading activation, which extracts a relevant set of these relationships as a patch. We test this algorithm in requirements repositories of four open-source software projects. Our results show that applying this algorithm creates useful patches with reduced superfluous information.

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Creating Socio-Technical Patches for Information Foraging: A Requirements Traceability Case Study

Cepulis

Niu

2018

2018 IEEE Symposium on Visual Languages and Human-Centric Computing (VL/HCC)

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“…There is a long history of research regarding the kind of questions that software developers and requirements analysts are likely to ask during RE activities and for software evolution [36], [37], [38], [9]. Recently, Malviya et al [39] have classified relevant questions for RE activities into nine families according to their purposes, among which we deem Business Rule Analysis (family 1), Requirements Elicitation (family 3), Process (family 5), Quality Assessment (family 7), Risk Management (family 8) and Stakeholder Analysis (family 9) to be the most relevant to legal requirements analysis.…”

Section: Most Relevant Questions To Legal Rementioning

confidence: 99%

“…The elicitation of domain concepts corresponds to multiple questions by Malviya et al [39], notably those having to do with business rule analysis (family 1, e.g., "list all business objectives") and stakeholder identification (family 9, e.g., "for a given requirement, who are the stakeholders of interest?" and "what kind of users are going to use the system?").…”

Section: Most Relevant Questions To Legal Rementioning

confidence: 99%

“…In addition, identifying the terms that lack an authoritative definition allows answering the questions of Malviya et al [39] concerning stakeholder identification (see above) and project glossary extraction (family 7, e.g.,"find all ambiguous words in the requirements" and "are there weak words in the document?"). We introduce our second question for our query system (Q2): What are the definitions for a given domain concept?…”

Section: Most Relevant Questions To Legal Rementioning

confidence: 99%

“…and "what obligations have been placed on which entities, e.g., resident taxpayer?"). Extracting prescriptions related to specific concepts corresponds to answering the questions of Malviya et al [39] aimed at requirements elicitation (family 3, e.g., "which requirements are related to requirement x?" and "need to know the regulatory compliance requirements pertinent to process x"), and at reviewing requirements to uncover errors or inconsistencies (family 7, e.g., "did I miss any requirements from stakeholders?").…”

Section: Most Relevant Questions To Legal Rementioning

confidence: 99%

See 2 more Smart Citations

A Query System for Extracting Requirements-Related Information from Legal Texts

Sleimi

Ceci

Sannier

et al. 2019

2019 IEEE 27th International Requirements Engineering Conference (RE)

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Searching legal texts for relevant information is a complex and expensive activity. The search solutions offered by present-day legal portals are targeted primarily at legal professionals. These solutions are not adequate for requirements analysts whose objective is to extract domain knowledge including stakeholders, rights and duties, and business processes that are relevant to legal requirements. Semantic Web technologies now enable smart search capabilities and can be exploited to help requirements analysts in elaborating legal requirements. In our previous work, we developed an automated framework for extracting semantic metadata from legal texts. In this paper, we investigate the use of our metadata extraction framework as an enabler for smart legal search with a focus on requirements engineering activities. We report on our industrial experience helping the Government of Luxembourg provide an advanced search facility over Luxembourg's Income Tax Law. The experience shows that semantic legal metadata can be successfully exploited for answering requirements engineering-related legal queries. Our results also suggest that our conceptualization of semantic legal metadata can be further improved with new information elements and relations.

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The state-of-practice in requirements elicitation: an extended interview study at 12 companies

et al. 2021

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Context.Requirements engineering remains a discipline that is faced with a large number of challenges, including the implementation of a requirements elicitation process in industry. Although several proposals have been suggested by researchers and academics, little is known of the practices that are actually followed in industry.Objective. We investigate the state-of-practice with respect to requirements elicitation, by closely examining practitioners' current practices. To this aim, we focus on the techniques that are used in industry, the roles that requirements elicitation involves, and the challenges that the requirements elicitation process is faced with. Method.We conducted an interview-based survey study involving 24 practitioners from 12 different Swedish IT companies. We recorded the interviews and analysed these recordings by using quantitative and qualitative methods.Results. We found that group interaction techniques, including meetings and workshops, are the most popular type of elicitation techniques that are employed by the practitioners, except in the case of small projects. Additionally, practitioners tend to use a variety of elicitation techniques in each project. We noted that customers are frequently involved in the elicitation process, except in the case of market-driven organizations. Technical staff (for example, developers and architects) are more frequently involved in the elicitation process compared to the involvement of business or strategic staff. Finally, we identified a number of challenges with respect to stakeholders. These challenges include difficulties in understanding and prioritizing their needs. Further, it was noted that requirements instability (i.e., caused by changing needs or priorities) was a predominant challenge. These observations need to be interpreted in the context of the study. Conclusion.The relevant observations regarding the survey participants' experiences should be of interest to the industry; experiences that should be analysed in the practitioners' context. Researchers may find evidence for the use of academic results in practice, thereby inspiring future theoretical work, as well as further empirical studies in the same area.

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What Questions do Requirements Engineers Ask?

Cited by 13 publications

References 18 publications

Creating Socio-Technical Patches for Information Foraging: A Requirements Traceability Case Study

Creating Socio-Technical Patches for Information Foraging: A Requirements Traceability Case Study

A Query System for Extracting Requirements-Related Information from Legal Texts

The state-of-practice in requirements elicitation: an extended interview study at 12 companies

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